-
Henry Lowington Blakely II
- University of Illinois Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
henry loWington Blakely ii (1916–1996) lovalerie king In Henry Blakely’s poem, “What If,” the speaker poses the dual question, “What if the atoms of my breath / be galaxies, / and all man’s great philosophies / his fear of death?”1 Like so many of his other poems, “What If” displays the poet’s deeply contemplative nature, his need to pose the existential question. Blakely was born in 1916 to Henry Lowington and Pearl Telley Blakely; his maternal family background included Kentucky slavery. His mother’s family settled in Chicago where Pearl met Henry Blakely I at Wendell Phillips High School. Their marriage yielded three sons, Henry, Julius, and Edgar. The elder Henry Blakely was a dreamer and an inventor, which led to some problems on the domestic front. While he could earn a good income in the steamfitting trade, the dreamer in him drove him to spend time on a variety of inventions. Pearl Blakely was more practical. Blakely would contrast his parents in the poem, “My Daddy”: “Mother was earth / and nourished us. / But Daddy saw earth / as mire / trapping the feet and movement / and promises of far journeys.”2 When Blakely was thirteen years old, his father left the family and moved in with another woman. In his biography of Gwendolyn Brooks, George Kent writes that Henry seems to have been the most affected by his father’s desertion . Not only did Blakely have to endure the fact of the desertion, but he also knew that his father had children with other women. With irregular support from the father, the family moved often and Henry, for a time, came to associate hunger with his father’s domestic failures. In “My Daddy,” he writes, “Hunger I came to not care for, / nor for Daddy, / before I was old enough to see / that dreams / must be paid for, / that it is as right / to want fuel for flight / as for boiling beans.”3 The poem, really an epic salute to his father, reveals the breadth and depth of the family anguish the father’s desertion caused. Still, his “single” mother raised him with love and discipline. George Kent writes that in characterizing his relationship with his “single” mother, Blakely recalled both the tender times when his mother read poetry to her sons and the times when she bestowed severe whippings on them to instill discipline. henry loWington Blakely ii • 61 Like his father and namesake, Henry Blakely was also a dreamer. At Tilden High School in Chicago, young Henry found an outlet for the technical aptitude he inherited from his father and, later, he found an outlet for the sensitive poet part of himself in writing classes at Wilson Junior College. By 1937, he called himself a writer and hoped to find a partner who also wrote. He struck gold when he met Gwendolyn Brooks at the YWCA on Forty-Sixth and South Park (later MLK Drive). Brooks wrote that upon taking note of Blakely, she immediately declared, “There is the man I am going to marry.”4 Against his mother’s (perhaps somewhat prophetic) protests that Henry was not ready to take on the responsibilities of husband and father, the couple married two years later, on September 17, 1939, with the Reverend T. C. Lightfoot officiating. While his mother had argued practically that Henry was still in college and a dreamer who had no real way of supporting a family, Henry proved a resilient amalgam of his mother’s practicality and his father’s technical ability and dreamy, questing nature. Nevertheless, some of Pearl Blakely’s wisdom was realized in hindsight because Henry and Gwendolyn struggled to deal with the myriad tensions that married life can bring even in the best of circumstances; there were several separations. In his biography of Brooks, George Kent writes that the couple later discussed their separations casually enough. Blakely felt that marriage had “required him to lose innocence and toughen up immediately, whereas Gwendolyn could retain a certain innocence.” As they had both been poets, Blakely felt he understood her situation much “better than she could understand the realities he faced outside the home.”5 Blakely’s literary life clearly came in second behind the role of family man. Brooks writes of Blakely in the introduction to Windy Place (1974) that he was not someone who “cared to rush into print.”6 No doubt the immediacy of attempting to provide for home and family forestalled the development of his craft and, thus...