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Chapter 5 Living Culture in Sterling Brown's Southern Road James Weldon Johnson's fiction implicitly challenged Race Men and Women to contend with class, gender, and regional differences within the race, despite the hegemonic tendency to view Black people monolithically .1 Sterling Brown's body of poetry introduces a new set of questions of concern to Renaissance intellectuals because rather than exploring the dynamics between the bourgeois and proletariat classes, he puts the imaginative visions ofordinary Black people at the center ofhis poetry, and considers what they had to say about the state of the race. Brown's blues poetry puts him in the company of younger, more radical writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Hurston, who resisted their older, more conservative peers' desires to elevate African American culture to meet bourgeois standards of propriety and achievement, or to assume the passivity of poor and working-class African Americans. In this way, he departed from what Robin Kelley describes as a typical move in "race relations scholarship" to paint an "image of an active black elite and a passive working class."2 He defined the "New Negro" as an individual oriented toward the idea of racial progress and advancement , rather than as an individual situated in a particular geographic location (Harlem) or social position (middle class), thus articulating a theory of vernacular culture that recognized the expressive and empowering potential of nonliterary forms of expression like the blues. Brown's finely tuned ear for the subtleties and complexities of folk expressions had to be learned. This sensibility grew from his work as an amateur folklorist, which he commenced after graduating from Williams College with a B.A. in 1918 and Harvard University with an M.A. in 1923.3 A succession of teaching assignments in the South, first atVirginia Seminary and College (1923-26), then Lincoln University in Missouri (1926-28), and finally Fisk University in Tennessee (1928-29), immersed Brown in the midst of the Black Belt where he spent time associating with people on their porches, in barber shops, and around jook joints. In those communal places, he honed 92 Chapter 5 his listening skills and learned from the people he encountered about their everyday experiences, desires, and concerns. After that period, in 1929 Brown commenced what would become a long and distinguished teaching career at Howard University at the same time he entered a successful period as a poet and critic. His early poetry was published in the twenties in Opportunity magazine and in anthologies like Countee Cullen's Caroling Dusk (1927) and James Weldon Johnson's Book of American Negro Poetry (1922).4 Southern Road, his first collection of poetry, was published in 1932. Brown's work in ethnology continued when he assumed a post between 1936 and 1940 as the Editor of Negro Affairs to the Works Progress Administration's (WPA) Federal Writers' Project. He also contributed to Gunnar Myrdal's monumental sociological study of race in America, An American Dilemma (1944).5 Both the form and content of Brown's poetry revealed his encyclopedic knowledge offolklore. Poems might take the form ofthe blues or recreate the rhythms of a work song; and whether or not they were written in the vernacular , their themes and images reflected the perspectives of African American Southerners. The fact that so many of the poems in Southern Road explored the threat of individual and communal destruction from either social or natural forces suggests that he accepted the allegory of salvage articulated by modern anthropologists. In his poetry, the values and folkways of Southern rural Negroes were perpetually on the verge of disappearing, but the almost seamless continuity between the folk culture he observed and the poetry he wrote suggests that Brown's poetry, like an ethnographic narrative, aspired to preserve and transmit the source material. In addition to viewing Southern Black culture as a vanishing entity in need of preservation, Brown also saw and represented it as a culture of resistance whose significance would remain relevant even in the face of the rapid social changes American Negroes were experiencing. Thus, in Southern Road, he introduces the idea ofmobility, embodied by the figure of the road, to underscore not only his awareness of the race's desire for social mobility, but also to mobilize a notion of African American culture as adaptable, supple, and multiply unfolding. David Anderson argues for Brown's conceptualizing of culture as a process by pointing to his depiction of folklore as an instrument of...

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