In Sterling's House

At the end of Haile Gerima’s film on Sterling A. Brown, “After Winter,” his subject is shown climbing the steps leading to his house on a hill in Northeast Washington. Brown, in his 80s then, is holding onto the black wrought-iron railing as he takes each concrete step in a measured, methodical way. It is daylight. A strong wind is blowing. And “Climbing Jacob’s Ladder” is the music accompanying Brown’s ascent. It is a simple and awe-inspiring moment, a wonderful ending to a film that honors a man who had given over his life to his people the best way he knew: through literature, scholarship and the perfection of the art of pedagogy.

It is a home-going, of sorts.

Sometimes now, as I bound up those steps, I see Gerima’s image of Brown before me and I am awed once again. The fleeting gift of my relative youth—I am 36—allows me often to forget that the railing is there. But I can never forget the man whose footsteps I trace daily. I am walking those same steps, I say to myself. It is a humbling fact.

I have lived in the Brown home since January 1996. I moved in just weeks after signing my name to a 30-year mortgage and making an even deeper commitment to myself to honor the history of this house and the lives that blossomed within its walls.

Brookland, the community in Washington, D.C., where the Brown house is located, is an island of relative safety and solitude in an ailing and struggling city. Every social ill one can imagine festers here in the nation’s capital, and it is mostly African Americans who are afflicted. Sometimes it seems not much has changed. In the 1930s, Brown wrote about the poverty and deprivation that black people suffered in “The Negro in Washington,” a project distinguished for its accuracy and thoroughness.

But always alongside the deep poverty has been a strong middle class, of which Sterling Allen Brown was a solid member. Brookland became and remains one of the footholds of that middle class. Once, it was a Washington suburb and all white. The Brown family helped change that racial status quo. In the 1930s, Sterling Brown’s mother, Adelaid Allen Brown, bought two plots on a small hill in Brookland. Until then, according to her son, it had been the neighborhood’s favorite spot for crap-shooting and card-playing. His mother built two houses there, one a large colonial for herself and her two daughters and a smaller, more modest house for her son, his wife, Daisy, and their adopted son. The family’s arrival in the area in 1935, Brown recalled in a 1970s newspaper article, was not celebrated.

“When the homes were complete, ‘For Sale’ signs in the neighborhood seemed to sprout overnight,” he wrote in the Washington Star.

Brown recalled one young man—whose accent gave him away as Irish—who often drove by the houses and yelled “naygur.” The word, Brown also said, frequently was painted on the sidewalk in front of the family homes. “Once, it was spelled NIGER. Though my only connection with that country that I know of is my friendship with our former ambassador there, W. Mercer Cook. But what is a single G among friends?”

This is the Sterling Brown of Slim Greer fame, who handled racism with wit and wisdom and just the right dose of condescension.

Brown was fiercely proud of Brookland and eagerly came to the defense of the Black middle class that took up residence there. His Washington Star essay was written in response to an Irish writer who had mourned the area’s decline. Brown wrote: “To me, Brookland was not, and is not a ‘ghetto.’ In my block, our neighbors have included the chairman of the department of electrical engineering at Howard University, a leading gynecologist, a family whose sons are a doctor and teachers (one at Harvard) . . . and a host of other good hard-working people.”

There are still a lot of good, hard-working people here in...