Sterling A. Brown's Literary Essays: The Black Reader in the Text

“All poetry is the reproduction of the sounds of actual speech.”

—Robert Frost

“Whenever I feel uneasy about my writing, I think: what would be the response of the people in the book if they read the book? That’s my way of staying on track.”

—Toni Morrison

“You can read my letter, baby, But you sure can’t read my mind.”

—Blues lyric

A realist not only by artistic and critical persuasion, but by temperament, Sterling A. Brown has shown concern throughout his career with poetry as an art of communication—not just among airy Muses and free spirits, but among real people in this world, actual writers and their readers. Publishers, editors, reviewers, and “blurbists” shape this communication process, as do those persons whose lives are depicted in literature. Brown’s critical writings deal mainly with the literary portrayal of Afro-Americans. The question sounding through virtually every critical piece he writes is this one: How true is this work to the lives of the people portrayed, as their real-life counterparts themselves see it? Here literary virtuosity is just one test for value: Granted a given work about black life is well-made and “interesting” (to use Henry James’s key term); but would the blacks put in the book recognize their own speech and actions, their own sense of life? Or are these more stick and stock “Negro Characters as Seen by White Authors”? ¹

Complicating these questions is the issue that Sterling A. Brown laments in several critical pieces of the 1930s and 1940s: Afro-Americans, for the most part, “are not yet a reading people.” ² When blacks did read works about themselves, too many reacted with insecurity or “bourgeois” diffidence. Why was this true of a group for whom, as many authors of slave narratives made clear, writing and reading were deemed near magic gifts, ones for which 19th-century blacks prayed, stole, tricked, studied in secret, and sometimes paid with lashings and other dire punishments? And what are the literary implications of the black audience’s neglect and misperception? What are the costs for black writers who, observes Brown, are the only ones really called upon and able to give a comprehensive “insider’s” look at Afro-American life? ³ Finally how, considering the tastes and distastes of black readers and potential readers, might the black writer reach them?

In many of his early essays and reviews, Brown turns his attention to the vagaries of the Afro-American audience. One reason blacks did not read was that to do so seemed frivolous for a group beset by the crushing economic pressures of the Depression. “What help in books for an increasing breadline?” they asked. ⁴ “Why should poor people needing their money for necessities such as bread and shoes, rent and coal, pay from two dollars to five dollars for a book?” ⁵ But even those not under the threat of economic collapse usually did not read: “Our practical man, often self made, and often admirably so, distrusts mere book learning as a useless appendage.” When the black college graduate picked up a book, he tended, Brown says, to shun books by or about blacks:

Some of this is based upon an understandable desire to escape the perplexities and pressures of the race situation in America. Some of it is based upon the ineptitude of immature authors dealing with difficult subject matter. Quite as much is based upon a cast-ridden disdain of Negro life and character, and anguish at being identified with an ignorant and exploited people to whom many “upper class” Negroes are completely unsympathetic. ⁶

In a key essay, “Our Literary Audience,” Brown declares that “there is a great harm that we can do our incipient literature. With a few noteworthy exceptions, we are doing that harm, most effectively.” ⁷ The short answer to the essay’s topic question—Why aren’t black readers good readers?—is quoted from Brown’s “young friend” whose survey reported: “Too much bridge.”

Charging that many blacks who read are put off by...