Sterling's Way

“Achilles, of course,” the professor continued, “wasn’t right bright.”

And suddenly the world—my world—was less intimidating, less large, more manageable. Everything intimidated me in those days, more than fifty years ago: the university, the mountain of studies confronting me, the dreadful reality of being away from home for the first time—everything. But here was the brilliant professor snatching away the shroud of mystery from classical literary figures, making them accessible to the likes of me, making them breathe.

That was Sterling’s way. He would cut right through the outer layer and touch the core of the matter, the core here being the living humanity of mythical characters.

My initial acquaintance with Professor Sterling Brown was brief: After a week or so, the class was turned over to a most unremarkable graduate student, whose name, face, and subject matter I have forgotten. But Sterling Brown had impressed me indelibly. A handsome, vigorous man in his mid-forties, he was warm and informal with students, even lowly freshmen like me (and upperclassmen who were repeating the course), in the manner of one who is at home in his world. I have since learned that teachers/scholars sometimes envy their students’ youth or exploit it, resent time spent in the classroom away from their research, or harbor frustrations which they ventilate on students. Sterling was never like that. His warmth and informality, through which one could sense his keen intellect and scholarly capacity, seemed—to me at least—an invitation into the realm of the mind. He was the link between ourselves and the ancient world of the Iliad. He broke the bonds that held us to the here and now; he showed us vistas of limitless possibilities.

I had heard that Sterling Brown was a distinguished poet. I had never read any of his poems; in the segregated schools of Baltimore, we were taught precious little about our black heritage except during Negro History Week. For five days we learned about Phillis Wheatley, Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, George Washington Carver, and Langston Hughes. Nobody actually read Wheatley’s work or understood what Washington had said or Carver had done. Somebody always recited Dunbar’s “In the Morning” or “When Malindy Sings” and Hughes’ “I,Too, Sing America.” The thrust of our discussion was always the contributions which the Negro had made to America and our abiding hope that someday white people would accept us as equals—an equality that, sadly, many of us did not, in our heart of hearts, believe. Certainly little that we read or said reflected the tragic reality of our historical experience or even the reality of our everyday lives. We never read slave narratives, Du Bois, Harper, McKay, Walker, Hurston, Wright—or Sterling Brown.

Howard University—the Capstone of Negro Education, it was called—was no better. There was a course in Negro literature, but it was seldom offered, and no black authors were included in American literature or humanities courses. Prodded by curiosity about Professor Brown’s poetry, I began to read on my own. I had never ever read such poems! They had nothing to do with trees and sunsets, lost loves and melancholy. There was no obscure symbolism to crack, no obsolescent vocabulary, no elusive theme to discover. I did not have to enter another world to experience these poems. They spoke to me in language I had heard all my life without realizing its beauty, in the voices of people I knew and respected, even loved. Sister Lou was my grandma. Slim Greer did odd jobs in our neighborhood. And sitting out on the front steps on a Saturday, I often watched Sportin’ Beasley steppin’ it till the sun went down. But now I saw the people and their lives in a new dimension which broadened and deepened my insights into my world and my essential self.

The years have given me this realization. I was too young, too callow then to know that I had turned a corner into the true direction of my life. Epiphany is usually a lightning bolt, but it can also be...