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chapter 4 Two Bronzeville Autobiographies Q: (George Stavros) Are your characters literally true to your experience or do you set out to change experience? A: (Gwendolyn Brooks) Some of them are, are invented, some of them are very real people. The people in the little poem called “The Vacant Lot” really existed and really did those things. For example: “Mrs. Coley’s three flat brick / Isn’t here any more. / All done with seeing her fat little form / Burst out of the basement door.” Really happened! That lot is still vacant on the street where I was raised. (My mother still lives on the street.) “Matthew Cole” is based on a man who roomed with my husband’s aunt. And I remember him so well, I feel [it] really came through in the poem. “The Murder” really happened except for the fact that I said the boy’s mother was gossiping down the street. She was working. (I guess I did her an injustice there.) “Obituary for a Living Lady” is based on a person I knew very well.1 Gwendolyn Brooks,a lifelong Bronzeville resident and the firstAfricanAmerican to win the Pulitzer Prize, showed an abiding commitment to the people of Bronzeville in this 1969 interview with Contemporary Literature; this commitment made her poetry and fiction so powerful for the duration of her literary career. The people of Bronzeville are her chief inspiration for the works spanning her lifetime from her first publication in 1945, A Street in Bronzeville, to her famed poetry during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s.The people of Bronzeville assist her in evoking a great feeling of place in her work; she’s quoted as saying“I start with the people. For instance, Maud Martha goes to the Regal Theater, which is almost dead now, but had a great history in Chicago. She looks at the people; she looks at the star; she looks at the people coming out of the theater. But . . . suffice it to say that I don’t Schlabach_AlongtheStreets_text.indd 75 5/6/13 1:30 PM 76 chapter 4 start with the landmarks.”2 The city itself, with its people’s despair, defeats and small victories, and teeming human diversity, yielded subjects enough to inspire her creative imagination as well as many other authors, poets, and visual artists of the Renaissance period.3 As one of the primary authors of the Chicago Black Renaissance, Brooks, along with other Chicago artists and literati, distinguished a self-consciousness of what it meant to be writing in Bronzeville concomitant with a consciousness of the significance of that place and its people to her writing. Bronzeville’s authors evidence an awareness of this relationship between place, their life stories, and craft; this understanding had a lasting impact on African Americans’ racial self-distinction. Brooks traversed various Bronzeville addresses, as this chapter will track, with a different sense of ease than that of other writers and artists of the Chicago Black Renaissance, especially Richard Wright. Both Wright and Brooks, at various points of their lives, up until Brooks’s death in 2000, lived in the heart of Bronzeville.Certainly additional authors,’ artists,’ and musicians’ lives warrant similar examination during this vibrant period—Margaret Walker, Archibald Motley, Langston Hughes, Frank Yerby, and Lorraine Hansberry to name a few.As individuals with deep and abiding connections to Bronzeville, their lives, too, evidence a profound relationship between place and craft. Gwendolyn Brooks is vital to any understanding of the Chicago Black Renaissance. Her fiction is so important because she was deeply immersed in Bronzeville’s geography. The reason why any of Brooks is useful after A Street in Bronzeville published in 1945 is that her setting remains the South Side of Chicago.There are few moments later in her selected poems when she dealt with material outside of Bronzeville, such as Little Rock, Arkansas, or when she wrote about the 1955 Emmett Till lynching4—but she did it in the guise of Chicago; her characters were always Bronzeville mothers. Her poetry reminds readers of the Black Belt; whatever she wrote it was always about the people living there, and all she was doing was looking out the window, asking the people outside her door to just“live.”Her genius, however, elevated them above the literal.To this end, her art captured the beauty of blackness as seen in the expressions and daily activities of Bronzeville’s people. She searched the souls of black folks, registering in her...

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