Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

#24. The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, Gwendolyn Brooks [obviously!], edited by Elizabeth Alexander

2005, Library of America (American Poets Project)

 

This book is really intensely interesting.  Gwendolyn Brooks was a very important Modernist, and this volume showcases many of her better-known short works, but it also samples from each of her books (which were real poetry books, that is, planned around central conceits and doing a book's work), as well as from her longer narrative works.  It covers years and years, from the start of her long career to its end in her old age, and you can watch the changes both in her style and in her interests.  (Of the latter, the most obvious is the change that comes when she became interested in applying poetry to the politics of the civil rights movement, and vice versa.)

 

The editor did a really good job, I think, putting together a small book out of 55 years' work like that.  The editor herself, Elizabeth Alexander, is a poet and professor of poetry at Yale.  (She is also African American.)  I hadn't heard of her before reading this book -- or thought I hadn't -- but then realized, retrospectively, that I actually probably had, because she was selected to write and read the inauguration poem at Obama's inauguration in January.

 

(Also also, the book has a cover design by Chip Kidd, which is one reason its design is so eye-catching and awesome. ;)

 

 

( Some quotations from the Brooks poems in the book... )

 

[Tags I would add if I could: chicago, color/colorism, harlem, history.]

#16. Bless Me, Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya
1972, Quinto Sol

It is the 1940s.  Antonio, who is almost seven, lives with his family in a small riverside community in "the llano" -- a vast, green plain where sheep, goats and cattle graze, and vaqueros make their living herding them out in the freedom and silence.  Antonio's father comes from the Márez family, which has always roamed the llano, but his mother comes from the Lunas, settled farmers and town-builders, and she wants her youngest son to become a farmer or a priest.  Antonio doesn't know which way his blood will pull him, but he is on the brink of many changes: he's about to start making the walk across the river every day with his sisters to attend the school up in town, where, the kids say, they make you learn English; he will start catechism in preparation for his first communion, and enter into the privileged community of those with whom God shares secrets; the end of the war might bring his older brothers home; and -- most immediately and excitingly -- Ultima, known as la Grande, the venerated curandera, is coming to live with them.  Ultima is a medicine woman, a healer, and a sage -- not, Antonio is convinced, a witch, as some people call her.  But not everyone agrees with him...

( More on magic, rivers, wide plains, fish... )

A Soldier's Play, Charles Fuller
1982

This play won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.  It's set in an Army training camp in the deep South (Louisiana) in 1944, during the Second World War, and it is, at least in one sense, a murder mystery.  Vernon Waters, a black sergeant who was responsible for a group of black enlisted men, has been found shot to death outside the base's nightclub.  Who did it?  One of the white Southern officers, resentful of "uppity negroes" in the forces?  Klansmen from the nearby town?  One of Waters' own men? 

The Army sends an investigator to look into the death: Captain Davenport, an Army lawyer and the first black officer most of the men on the base have ever seen.  Davenport sets about interviewing all of Waters' men, one by one, trying to learn about the complex dynamics that existed within this group of men from many different backgrounds and parts of the country, and between them and the white officers who rank above them all.  All this, and he also has to contend with Captain Taylor: the men's well-intentioned commanding officer, who is furious that Headquarters sent a Negro to investigate -- because, he says, he wants justice for Waters, and the people around here will never let a white man be brought to justice on a black man's word...

If the play were a paint-by-numbers piece "about race," or "about racism," of course it wouldn't be very good (though I suppose it might be educational).  But the characters come alive, the tension runs high, and so what you see is humans in history navigating through a minefield of restrictions, assumptions, fears and aspirations that for a contemporary reader (at least, for me) are in many ways as foreign as another culture or country.  I added a tag "institutionalized racism" to this one, because it's hard for me to explain how strange and shocking it is to read about this essentially pre-integrated Army -- when as long as I've been alive the Army has seemed like one of the most relatively egalitarian, and indeed integrated, of our national institutions.  But it wasn't always that way, not even sixty years ago...

Anyway, I recommend this play to people interested in, well, in any of the elements I've mentioned.  I think I give it three and a half out of five stars.

Also, a tangential note: The copy of the play that I read listed in its front matter the cast of the 1982 opening production in New York, which featured not only Denzel Washington but also Samuel L. Jackson.  That seems like a pretty amazing coincidence to me.  But then I wondered if perhaps the available roles for black actors were so few that it was not too surprising that the cream of the nation's acting talent would be concentrated in a single mostly-black New York production.  Then I wondered to what extent that has changed between then and today.