Sterling Brown's Poetic Ethnography: A Black and Blues Ontology

Sterling A. Brown—poet, essayist, scholar, and teacher—articulated the ontology, or way of perceiving the world, of a group of people whose voices and concerns rarely found their way into print. While it is obvious to most scholars that Brown’s published and unpublished essays, reports, and studies analyzed and preserved for future generations the culture of Southern black America, ¹ what is less obvious is the ethnographic contribution of Brown’s poetry. Brown’s study of and commentary on ideology, folkways, customs, and world views of Southern blacks, in both his prose and poetry, crosses disciplinary boundaries. Brown as author moves between literary criticism and social commentary, between artistic creation and ethnographic theory and report. Brown’s ethnography of Southern black life is not only a study of African-American life and culture but also an addition to the material culture of African Americans. Artistic productions such as poetry can, indeed, be more than art forms. They also can be at one and the same time the record, expression, and study of a culture.

Even so, the polysemy—or multiple meanings/identities—of Brown’s poetic output was extraordinary for his day. The polysemy of Brown’s poetry includes the language of the trickster, which offers, for example, humor to critique apartheid in “Slim in Atlanta” and word play on “bad” to interrogate Southern notions of justice in “A Bad, Bad Man.” But the polysemy I speak of means more than multiple meanings gleaned from the words of the poems. It includes the many facets of the poetry as production—its many identities, including informant (in the ethnographic sense) on black Southern culture, commentator on the establishment and hegemony, protester of injustice and discrimination, literary artifact, historical and cultural document, shaper of aesthetic standards. As Joanne Gabbin informs us, Sterling Brown was interested in the healthy development of literature by and about African Americans and in the development of a “healthy literary audience” (186–88). But he was interested also in providing and encouraging the presentation of a valid portrait of Negro life and culture, as can be inferred from a reading of his articles and essays. In Southern Road (1932), The Last Ride of Wild Bill (1975), and other poetry, Brown is writing an ethnography of Southern African-American culture. ²

Ideally, an ethnographer, unlike a traditional cultural anthropologist, observes and reports on a culture using a research methodology that is free of prior standards of judgment, preconceived notions of culture, or biases such as Eurocentrism. The resulting ethnography should translate and explain through rhetoric and example the underlying ontological basis of a given culture. Unfortunately, the state of ethnography has not yet approached that ideal. Nevertheless, in recent years, the slap-dash work of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict and even the painstaking work of Bronislaw Malinowski have fallen into disrepute largely because the concept of an outsider truly participating in a culture as insider is highly suspect. ³ Recent ethnographies that are informed by post-modern theoretical concerns, accordingly, attempt to reflect a “self-and-other consciousness . . ., and the imperatives of reflexivity have shifted attention onto the literary, political, and historical features of ethnography” (Vidich and Lyman 40–41). Post-modern ethnographers have begun to seek ways to share their authorial and authoritative space with native informants, the people native to the culture who also speak the language of and are familiar with the culture of the ethnographer (Clifford, The Predicament of Culture 41–46). Post-modern ethnographic theory offers a new perspective on the poetic output of Sterling Brown, who spent much of his writing career bringing attention to the distortions that literati of the dominant culture attributed to Negro life, culture, character, and artistic production. And like the orature of folk storytellers, Brown’s writing is self reflexive. Brown is positioned as ideal ethnographic participant-observer because he had at least one foot in the culture he observed. As a trained folklorist, Brown had the skills and methodology necessary to record Southern black culture with accuracy and measured nuance. By the same token, as a descendant of...