AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: A Room of Our Own

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I’m Helena de Groot. Today, A Room of Our Own. Sterling Brown was funny. He had this way of telling you a story with a straight face, but with such an ear for language and timing that you’d be crying with laughter by the end of it. It was something he always said he learned down South, in Virginia, Missouri, and Tennessee, where he taught for a few years. And at night, he’d go and sit on a porch with the family of one of his students and listen to the stories and jokes and banter of these ordinary Black people—people who were, for the most part, uneducated, at least in the formal sense. Sterling Brown’s own life was very different. He’d literally been born on campus at Howard University. His father was an important professor and minister there, who’d always encouraged his son to study. Sterling Brown went to Williams College and Harvard, and following in his father’s footsteps, he’d go on to teach at Howard University himself for over 40 years. But I was interested in that moment when he left Washington, DC. So I asked Cornelius Eady, the poet, singer-songwriter and co-founder of Cave Canem, who wrote the foreword for the new edition of Sterling Brown’s Collected Poems. I wanted to know what he thought could have moved a young Black man, fresh out of Harvard, to go to Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1923.

Helena de Groot: So, 1923, okay, this was of course peak Jim Crow, the KKK was in full revival, just a few years before the Black population of Tulsa, Oklahoma had just been massacred.

Cornelius Eady: Wiped out. Yeah, yeah.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Like, what a time to move to Virginia if you don’t absolutely have to. Why do you think he did that?

Cornelius Eady: My guess, it’s a job, you know? I’m not a scholar of Sterling, so I don’t know every single detail, right. But my suspicion is that it’s the same way it has been for a lot of us. In fact, one of the connections between me and Sterling is that I also taught in Lynchburg, early in my career. And I went down there because it was a gig, you know.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: But the thing about him being in Lynchburg was that he really frequently would say that that residency, so to speak, his job in Lynchburg, that was when he really found his voice, when he really knew who he was writing about and writing for, right.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: You know, his background is not poor, right?

Helena de Groot: Right.

Cornelius Eady: And in fact, he went to Harvard, you know. So it gave him a layer of experience that he knew but hadn’t absorbed until he got to Virginia, at least from my point of view.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Cornelius Eady: And it was the way he got into the idea of African American life—ups, downs, wins, losses, joys, sorrows, et cetera, et cetera. And the vernacular, you know? The talking, right. You know, living there with the Black population, and hearing the stories that gave him, you know, the path.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: He knew what he was going to be working on from that point on, I believe.

Helena de Groot: Well there’s a poem, actually I was thinking about, called “Checkers.” It’s on page 79.

Cornelius Eady: Okay, yeah.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, I was wondering if you want to introduce it somehow, you know, maybe set it up a little so that people are like right there when it starts.

Cornelius Eady: Well, I think the thing with “Checkers” is that it’s the barbershop, right? (LAUGHS) You know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: This is one of the things I love—one of many things that’s great about Sterling is that he deals with all these different sort of aspects of African American life. Leisure of African American life, right? And that’s a really true thing. I mean, you know, you could probably find the equivalent—it would feel familiar. The players are different, but you’d get it, you’d feel the vibe, right?

Helena de Groot: Yeah. There’s, like, the second line, I didn’t actually know what that meant. “Totes a gat.”

Cornelius Eady: “Totes a gat” is a gun.

Helena de Groot: Oh! Okay, great, got it.

(RECORDING PLAYS)

Sterling Brown:

This is Sterling Brown reading poems at the Library of Congress on Monday, July 9, 1973.

(READS POEM)

Checkers

Mojo Pete is bad,

Totes a gat,

Shoots to kill

At the drop of a hat.

A man of God

Is Deacon Cole,

With the sins of the world

Upon his soul.

But Saturdays

These strangers meet,

The man of God

And Mojo Pete.

The barbershop loungers

Lie no more

Silently watching

The weekly war.

And although Pete

Won’t cuss at all

The deacon’s words

Aren’t biblical.

“Pusson, what gits

In de jam youse in,

Better let somebody

Play what kin.”

“Be not puffed up

With anything,

My son. Trust God,

An’ watch yo’ King!”

Mojo disdains

His loud-voiced boss,

Forgets his Missis,

Rebbish, cross.

Deacon Cole forgets

A world drenched with sin,

Vexed by the trouble

His kingrow’s in.

The phonebell jangles

Calling Pete;

Pete won’t budge

Got de deacon beat.

And they play their game

Till the night grows old:

The Shepherd, and the lost lamb

From the fold.

* * *

Cornelius Eady: Now, I mean, that is just perfect. I mean, this idea of the bad man and the good man, but the territory. The neutral territory is the barbershop, right? (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Right, right, right.

Cornelius Eady: Right. And basically saying, that is Black life. You have these neutral spaces where you just hang, right. And that’s the hang. That’s probably the glue of Black life. I mean, he was wonderful at spotlighting these kind of moments, right. Making the poems sort of declare that kind of reality. It’s beautiful work.

Helena de Groot: Yeah! And what I also what I also love about this poem and so many of his poems is how lifelike his characters are. You know, they’re not, like, these kind of genial, happy go lucky, sort of Black characters that you see in, like, a Joel Chandler Harris story, you know?

Cornelius Eady: (LAUGHS) Yeah.

Helena de Groot: But there’s also a little difference between, like, his characters, Sterling Brown’s characters, and let’s say, Paul Laurence Dunbar’s. You know? They are slightly less, like, good people, you know?

Cornelius Eady: (LAUGHS) Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And it seems like Sterling Brown is not afraid to, like, show people who are, you know, not good people, too.

Cornelius Eady: Yeah, well, like I said in my brief foreword, warts and all, right. But sometimes because of the history we’ve had in this country, you know, the pressure, especially then, was to try to show African Americans in the most positive light you could, you know. And the idea, of course, being that, you know, you want them to—you want to see that we’re human beings. This goes all the way back to, in my mind, to … you know, God, Jesus—

Helena de Groot: Phillis Wheatley?

Cornelius Eady: Phillis Wheatley, yeah! Where, basically the whole point of Wheatley is just basically to prove that the Negro, the slave has a soul, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: And a brain, you know. So the poems, the literature is trying to reinforce that idea, right? If you can convince your reader that that person is a functioning human being, just like you, logic says that you will lessen your grip on the idea that they’re lesser than you, right. So, literature is also is a persuasion. It’s a weapon. And you’re trying to reinforce or uplift the race, which is basically what a lot of this was. The thing with Sterling was that of course he thought, sure, but maybe it’s better to show them as real human beings. I mean, really.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: With flaws, with fears, with shortcomings, with, you know, and actually be a mirror to African American lives, to Negro lives, especially in the Jim Crow South, because it’s all about survival. Right?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: It’s, how do you survive? The overriding or undercurrent, I should say, of all this is white supremacy.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: How do you operate? How do you get to negotiate that, right? You know, does the church offer a bit of relief and safety? You know, where do you find sort of relaxing and being yourself? So you see in the barbershop, for example, those two threads, you know, good and bad, but good and bad in trying to figure out how to deal with racism, right?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: The preacher, you know, is dealing with it that way, with God, and the bad man is dealing with it with the gun.

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Cornelius Eady: So, how do you deal with the overriding, you know, bubble that you’re in called poverty and racism, right. What’s heroic is survival. But how you survive isn’t always heroic.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: So I think that’s what Sterling is trying to point out in these poems.

Helena de Groot: That was really a beautiful way of saying that. And I mean, that’s also what I love so much about this poem, sort of how contradictory these characters are, like, complicated. You know, like people.

Cornelius Eady: Yeah! Like people. And they also acknowledge each other. They see each other, right. Not only do they see each other, but there’s a larger context of the shop itself. They see them, too, right.

Helena de Groot: Yeah! Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. “The barbershop loungers / Lie no more / Silently watching / The weekly war.” They’re all silent and watching, yeah.

Cornelius Eady: But it is that entertainment, right. Safe entertainment, because, you know, the bad guy is not going to pull his gat out and start shooting the priest or anybody else.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Cornelius Eady: You know, and you can listen to the preacher go on and on about God and stuff. But you know they’re not going to fall to their knees and ask to be saved. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s interesting! Yeah, exactly. There were also these lines that I loved where, you know, the bad guy, Mojo Pete, won’t cuss at all. Right? He’s holding his tongue because he’s sitting right across the deacon.

Cornelius Eady: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: But “The deacon’s words / Aren’t biblical.” You know? I thought that was really funny.

Cornelius Eady: Right, exactly. They’re at ease. I guess that’s the way to put it.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: They’re at ease, for that moment, right. And nobody’s going to break into that. Nobody white is going to break into that space, right?

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah, of course.

Cornelius Eady: And tell them what to do or make them start to be subservient or stuff like that. That’s purely a Black construction that Sterling is making there. Purely Black, right?

Helena de Groot: That really puts the end of the poem in real relief, you know, “The phonebell jangles / Calling Pete; / Pete won’t budge / Got de deacon beat.”

Cornelius Eady: That’s right. Right.

Helena de Groot: He has more important things on his mind! You know?

Cornelius Eady: But he’s off duty, and he doesn’t care, right.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: Like “Hey man, weren’t you supposed to be there for this job we were doing?” (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHING) Yeah. Exactly.

Cornelius Eady: So again: really pure Black moment that Sterling is preserving in that poem.

Helena de Groot: You said something that I want to pick up on. I think the word you used was “leisure.”

Cornelius Eady: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: You know, that this is really sort of a portrayal of Black leisure, and that that is quite extraordinary, because it is not under the hold or abiding to the rules of white supremacy, which, of course, just wants to extract labor and, the end, you know?

Cornelius Eady: Right. Right. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: So when you look at the body of his poems, you know, do you feel like he was actually looking for places where white supremacy does not rule?

Cornelius Eady: Oh, that’s a good question. That’s a good question, I know what you’re getting at, right? It’s basically, is there intention in the poems. Yes. There’s intention in the poems. Absolutely.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: There’s a deliberateness, absolutely. You know, that’s also his argument as well. Basically saying, “Look, you know, how do we prove the Negro is a human being,” right? How do you prove it?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: I’m going to go for places that you’re not actually going to see all the time. Like, “Those Winter Sundays,” for example, right, where you actually have, for me, as a reader, it was one of the first poems I ever, ever read where you saw the interior of a Black person’s house. Right?

Helena de Groot: Oh, wow. I’m sorry, what poem is that?

Cornelius Eady: “Those Winter Sundays,” by ... oh, god, I’m bad with names today—

Helena de Groot: Oh! Robert Hayden.

Cornelius Eady: Hayden! Yes, sorry. Yes. But that poem, ostensibly, it’s about the relationship between the father and the son, right. But in order to remember the father’s duty, you have to be in the house, right. You are now in the interior of a house you probably would never walk into.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Totally.

Cornelius Eady: Right. And definitely not walk into, you know, in American poetry, up to that point.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: What you’ve got in Sterling’s poem about the barbershop, is that you get the interior of a barbershop, right? Of a Black barbershop.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: That doesn’t exist any place else in literature except in this poem, right. In “Those Winter Sundays,” you get the same thing. You get the interior of an African American house, living in the house that isn’t—it’s not a shack, it’s not a hovel, you know.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Cornelius Eady: And the duties of that house that the father takes on, you know, lighting the fires and all this kind of stuff to make sure that the son in memory now recalls as being that, “Oh, my god, I took that all for granted. What did I know?” Right?

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Actually, can you read the poem? I don’t know if you have it open. I can send you a link if you want.

Cornelius Eady: Yeah, sure. If you could send it to me, because I haven’t got it around.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah. So, I’ve just sent you a link.

Cornelius Eady: I got it, I got it.

Helena de Groot: Okay, great.

Cornelius Eady: Oh my god, that’s great.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Cornelius Eady: (LAUGHING) Okay.

(READS POEM)

Those Winter Sundays

by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

* * *

Helena de Groot: Yeah. It is really a terrific poem. What really strikes me about both those poems is maybe not the space, but the love, you know?

Cornelius Eady: Well, that’s exactly right. That is, I guess what I was trying to say in the barbershop is, exactly right. Nothing bad’s gonna happen in that barbershop, right. What you see there is a kind of respect for the other, right.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: They are very different people. But they see that and they recognize it and they understand that. With Robert Hayden, it’s the understanding and the duty of the father in the house, you know, getting up, and what he remembers, he puts on his clothes, his cracked hands. You know, the weather is, you know, he starts the fire. So, there’s chronic angers in the house, but there’s also duty, right, and duty comes from love, right.

Helena de Groot: Mm.

Cornelius Eady: Yeah, the father has angers but he’s not a lowdown dog. Right? He’s not a blues guy who’s going from door to door, sneaking out the back door. You know, all this kind of stuff. He’s doing a parent’s duty, right?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: You also know that he works. He’s got a job. And he works really hard. You see it in the hands. “Cracked hands that ache from labor in the weekday weather,” you know? That’s also the love that Sterling has for African Americans, right.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Cornelius Eady: That’s his idea of somebody saying, “I will spotlight this. I love Black people. I love when they get together in the barbershop and just shoot the breeze.”

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Cornelius Eady: “I love that stuff,” right, “and I want to celebrate that.”

Helena de Groot: Yeah, well, I’m so interested in what you just said, and, I mean, you’re right. Sterling Brown’s poems are suffused with this feeling. “I love Black people. I love, you know, just when they hang out and are themselves,” you know? But there’s also something, you know, when I was reading interviews with Sterling Brown and reading articles about him, I also have a sense, like, yeah, he loved quote-unquote ordinary people—

Cornelius Eady: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: But what I can’t quite figure out is how he felt towards his, again, quote-unquote, peers. People who were also academics, also highly educated, also taught at Howard or something, you know, Black people, right, of this different class. And, you know, there’s a quote that I thought was really sort of telling in that regard, because, of course, Sterling Brown not just loved the people, but also loved their music, you know, the blues. And there’s this quote from an interview, which was published in 1980 in Callaloo, and he’s talking about Alain Locke and the difference between the two of them, you know.

Cornelius Eady: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: And he says, “Locke could not handle the blues.—

Cornelius Eady: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: “When the people behind Locke’s place on our street would be out there singing blues, Locke would pull down his window and put on Tchaikovksy.”

Cornelius Eady: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: “I don’t blame him, that’s the way he was trained. He knew the hell out of Tchaikovksy.”

Cornelius Eady: (LAUGHS) I love that.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) And then this next part, I was wondering if you can read that. So this is the next part of that quote.

Cornelius Eady: Okay. So he says, (PAUSES) (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Cornelius Eady: He says, “Now, I don’t blame Locke for this. More [N-words] have been ruined by Harvard than by bad gin.” (LAUGHS) Well, you see what I mean about the wit, right? I mean, that’s beautiful, right? Also, we realize the irony, of course, that he’s a Harvard man, too, okay.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: Right, right. So he’s kind of conveniently sort of forgetting that.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: But I get his point. And to go back to what you were starting with, this is the fight over what is the authentic voice.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Cornelius Eady: Again, ongoing. You know, what’s the authentic African American voice? And, you know, is it somebody who’s really sort of, like, down, right, or somebody who has sort of refined themselves? And proven, you know, as Wheatley says, “black as Cain, May be refin’d, and join th’angelic train,” right. So Locke is refined, trying to get a seat on that angelic train, right.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: But is the price for that who you really are. Right?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: I mean, this has been going on forever, right?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: I mean, but I also will say that it’s also an argument by saying, “Look, I’m going to put in people who you don’t think are poetic, but I’m going to tell you that their lives, small as they might be to you, are poetic. There’s a poetry in that barbershop. I’m not going to try to dismiss this as rough or to, you know, raw or whatever it is.” Right? “And that’s my part of the street I’m gonna walk on, right.” Locke is trying to do something that seems like, you know, “We can talk like you. We read what you read. We can absorb these ideas and we can throw them right back to you as easily as anybody.” Right?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: “In fact, better than anybody.” Okay. “So they’re going to start thinking that all we are is instinctive animals. I’m there to dissuade you of that position.” Right?

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Cornelius Eady: And both of those forks are equally important. Where we are right now, especially thanks to Cave Canem, and I hate to bring Cave Canem in, but—

Helena de Groot: No, no, no.

Cornelius Eady: But this is also part of the point. It’s okay to be Black the way you want to be Black, right. Anyone Black who writes poetry in America is an African American poet. Period.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: And if you’re an experimental poet, it’s African American poetry. If you want to write about, you know, a classical musician, you’re still an African American poet. Because of, you know, of this culture, you will never not be an African American poet.

Helena de Groot: Mm. Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: I know people have struggled with this. I know some people disagree with that, because they want to have the ability not to have race be a factor in their words. Or they want the reader not to simply decide that the only thing you can talk about is race.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: Also because people sometimes diminish African American poetry, because they don’t know it and they don’t read it. They think it’s all about protest, right. And only about protest and nothing else, right. And you lose all these different kind of nuances and layering and different ways of looking at it, different ways of approaching it when you do that. But from my opinion, you know, there is no wrong way to be an African American poet. There simply isn’t, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: But, you know, going back to Hayden, right, who also ran afoul with this, where basically people thought he was, I mean, “Middle Passage” is one of the great poems of all time, right.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: And to somehow think that he, as he was in the ’60s, become under suspicion that he wasn’t Black enough, when you can write a poem like that, just astonishes me. Right. You know, so, but the markers weren’t there for him. He was … from that point of view, he wasn’t down enough. You know, he had those ugly glasses. And he was too much of a—I guess, because I never met him, of course—

Helena de Groot: Of course, yeah, yeah.

Cornelius Eady: There was something about the personality that they felt this wasn’t in tune with whatever was going on at that moment, the Black Arts Movement, right. You know, what kind of a movement would doubt a person who would write a poem like “Middle Passage”?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: It just blows my mind. But it did happen. Lucille Clifton got a little bit of that early in her career. Because she was insisting on writing about, you know, what they considered the domestic, or the spiritual, right.

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh.

Cornelius Eady: And we were not having that at that moment. We were really trying to do something that was strident. We wanted to be something that was political, it had to be in your face, and Lucille, I don’t know about refused it, but she just didn’t do it, right. And, you know, that changed over the years, thank god. But I remember talking with Lucille about this. You know, for a moment, people looked at her slightly askance, because she wasn’t delivering that. But the poems there, as we know, are genius.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: And it’s African American poetry.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And so I’m wondering, at Cave Canem, how, specifically, do you create an environment where people feel that they can be any type of Black poet?

Cornelius Eady: We just do it. I know that sounds like a—but really, we just do it. We, one of those things where basically, when we started off, we made very clear that there was no—there was no litmus test. If you want to get in—Cave Canem was never a beginners’ workshop, right.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Cornelius Eady: That’s the one thing. You have to have something under your belt before you apply to Cave Canem. But the rest of the rest of it was just, you know, making sure that they understood that there weren’t going to be factions at Cave Canem. That we weren’t going to tolerate one person saying that it has to be political or nothing or it has to be experimental or nothing, or it has to be—

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: And the great thing about the fellows was that, like the barbershop, people sort of had an agreement that you had a truce and a timeout for a week, right? Basically. You know, where people weren’t trying to pull rank on anybody else, right. Or trying to make another person feel stupid. And, in fact, the combination of the different voices, we got to hear one another, clearly, right. You know, it was just one of those things where basically people sort of just helped each other, right. They were there for each other. They weren’t there to try to get famous. They weren’t there to try the best the other or be the star of the, you know, of the summer. They were all pulling towards helping each other to be their best voice, the way you sing it. Not the way that Terrance sings it, or Elizabeth sings it, or, you know, Toi sings it. You know, it’s basically, “How do I put it?” Right? You know, “But how do I put it?”

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Helena de Groot: Well, I wanted to ask you about the way Sterling Brown writes about racial injustice.

Cornelius Eady: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Because he never uses words like that, for instance, right, he never uses “racial injustice,” you know. He seems to bring it down to the smallest possible scale, you know, just a few people or a family, you know. And there’s one poem that I think really does that incredibly well. And it’s this poem called “Bitter Fruit of the Tree.”

Cornelius Eady: Oh, yeah. “Bitter Fruit of the Tree,” yeah.

(RECORDING PLAYS)

Sterling Brown: I have often been asked whether I am bitter about race relations in America and any treatment that I’ve had or that my people have had. And the best answer that I have to this is in a poem called “Bitter Fruit of the Tree,” which has been frequently anthologized.

(READS POEM)

Bitter Fruit of the Tree

They said to my grandmother: "Please do not be bitter,"
When they sold her first-born and let the second die,
When they drove her husband till he took to the swamplands,
And brought him home bloody and beaten at last.
They told her, "It is better you should not be bitter,
Some must work and suffer so that we, who must, can live,
Forgiving is noble, you must not be heathen bitter;
These are your orders: you are not to be bitter."
And they left her shack for their porticoed house.

They said to my father: "Please do not be bitter,"
When he ploughed and planted a crop not his,
When he weatherstripped a house that he could not enter,
And stored away a harvest he could not enjoy.
They answered his questions: "It does not concern you,
It is not for you to know, it is past your understanding,
All you need know is: you must not be bitter."
And they laughed on their way to reckon the crop,
And my father walked over the wide garnered acres
Where a cutting wind warned him of the cold to come.

They said to my brother: "Please do not be bitter,
Is it not sad to see the old place go to ruin?
The eaves are sprung and the chimney tower is leaning,
The sills, joists, and columns are rotten in the core;
The blinds hang crazy and the shingles blow away,
The fields have gone back to broomsedge and pine,
And the soil washes down the red gulley scars.
With so much to be done, there's no time for being bitter.
Your father made it for us, it is up to you to save it,
What is past is over, and you should not be bitter."
But my brother is bitter, and he does not hear.

* * *

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: Yeah, yeah.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, that line, “What is past is over, and you should not be bitter,” I mean, it seems straight out of today, right?

Cornelius Eady: Yeah, well, that’s the thing about Sterling. So much of this feels like it could be written yesterday. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: Right? Because it’s the bridge between his Jim Crow and our Jim Crow.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: Which has its own its own unique violences. Some of the violence in the Jim Crow he lived in was spectacular. You couldn’t get on a bus. You couldn’t drink out of a water fountain. You looked at a white girl the wrong way—even they imagined you looked at a white woman the wrong way, they string you up and then they set you on fire. You talk back in any way, and they string you up and they set you on fire. And then they have a barbecue and they sit around and they take pictures of it, right.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: So there’s that kind of just raw, ugly violence. But then you’ve got Sandra Bland. She’s sitting in her car, her car has been pulled over by a cop because of a supposed broken taillight, and as she’s talking to the cop, the cops says, “Put out your cigarette.” And she says, naturally, “Why should I?”

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: Three days later, she’s found hung, dead in her cell, right? You know, so, you know, we video them now.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: We can see George Floyd being crushed to death in real time while he’s begging for his life and then starts, you know, begging for his mother. And he knows, we can actually see the moment when he realizes he’s going to die. Right?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: So we hear the story in the ’30s, about what happens to the Black man. Everyone knows that. But we don’t—unless someone takes a photograph of the lynching, and there’s zillions of photographs out there, you don’t visualize it. But you actually can see it now, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: Eric Garner being pulled down by those cops on Staten Island. For selling loose cigarettes. And it’s just as flimsy a reason now as it was then, right?

Helena de Groot: Yeah, mm-hmm.

Cornelius Eady: Won’t put out a cigarette? Oh you get to die. You’re selling loose cigarettes on the street and you’re talking back? You got to die. Everyone saw the difference between the Black Lives Matter protest in DC when the troops came out and surrounded the Capitol and they were 15 deep. And then you have the white mob, the mainly white mob going up into the Capitol! Up through the steps into the Capitol. “Where’s Mike Pence? Where’s Mike Pence? Let’s hang him. Where’s Nancy Pelosi? Let’s kill her.” Right.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: And nobody. You know, I mean, they’re arresting them now, but that’s in real time. And you got to see that in real time, right. And the reason for the riot was to stop a legal, valid vote, which is basically, they were upset, because the urban centers, you know the code word for Black votes—they wanted to stop and neutralize the Black vote. So the bridge between the ’30s and the bridge between now, you know, I mean, the players are different, and in some ways, we’ve gotten even worse because the technology is caught up and it still doesn’t stop. So that’s the landscape we’re talking about. And it goes back to the poem, because the poem is what white people think Black people are supposed to do. We can do anything to you, but you can’t be better. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: Right? We can lynch you, we can rob you, we can do whatever we want to you. But you better not be bitter. You know, you should be happy that we don’t kill you outright. Because we can kill you outright. And the only thing we’re going to need is that we think you were uppity or you were bitter or you talk back, right?

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Cornelius Eady: And that’s still that’s still a death sentence in this country.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: You know, like I said, the underlying thread for the last poem was basically to say, I want you to understand how far back this reaches. This is generational. This is a generational thing, where they keep telling you the same thing. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s my grandfather, whether it’s my father, whether it’s me or my brother, right? They will always tell you this, why they are doing you dirt, right?

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Cornelius Eady: And they want you to understand them. Right?

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Cornelius Eady: They never want to understand you. They want you to understand them. Right? And that’s what the poem is also trying to illuminate, to me. This is how that works, right? You’re always there to try to figure them out. They’re never going to try to figure out, because you are beneath figuring out, right. And if you start to, you know, struggle under that, you’re going to be considered a problem.

Helena de Groot: Mm. Yeah, totally. It’s so interesting and so accurate that you say, that, you know, that white people will always want more understanding of their predicament, but will never, you know, make the effort to sort of understand the predicament of Black people in this country.

Cornelius Eady: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And there’s this one poem that is that is sort of mocking that, like by taking it to the next level. And it’s that poem called “Southern Cop.”

Cornelius Eady: Oh, “Southern Cop”! Yes, yes.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah, page 215.

Cornelius Eady: Yeah, yeah.

(READS POEM)

Southern Cop

Let us forgive Ty Kendricks.

The place was Darktown. He was young.

His nerves were jittery. The day was hot.

The Negro ran out of the alley.

And so he was shot.

Let us understand Ty Kendricks.

The Negro must have been dangerous,

Because he ran;

And here was a rookie with a chance

To prove himself a man.

Let us condone Ty Kendricks

If we cannot decorate.

When he was found what the Negro was running for,

It was too late;

And all we can say for the Negro is

It was unfortunate.

Let us pity Ty Kendricks,

He has been through enough,

Standing there, his big gun smoking,

Rabbit-scared, alone,

Having to hear the wenches wail,

And the dying Negro moan.

* * *

Helena de Groot: (SIGHS) Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: Yeah. Poor Ty. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yeah, exactly. Right?

Cornelius Eady: What a bother. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Must be tough. Yeah, exactly.

Cornelius Eady: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: So, you put this poem to music.

(POEM TO MUSIC PLAYS)

And so I’m just wondering like, what goes into that. Like, how do you pick the poem, and then what do you want to add with the music and what do you not want to add. You know, like, what is already there, what do you feel like you can add, you know?

Cornelius Eady: Yeah, yeah. What you want to do is have music that will buttress the poem but not overrun it.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Cornelius Eady: You know, it’s always going to be the poem first.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Cornelius Eady: So I’m trying to do something that’s not going to intervene in such a way that people will pay more attention to the music than to the words.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: The other thing, of course, is how contemporary that story feels, right?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: It feels like it was just done yesterday. It could have been done yesterday. It might be done today.

Helena de Groot: Absolutely.

(POEM TO MUSIC FADES IN)

Cornelius Eady: The story is, of course, the threat of the Black body. He’s running. Just like, today it’s Arbery’s anniversary, the guy in Georgia who was doing exactly the same thing. He was running in Georgia, you know, Black body running. And, you know, they killed him for that. They shot him for that. They chased him and shot him for that. You know, and this is the same circumstance in the poem. He was running. He was running towards him, I guess, running in the alley. And he saw him running. He must be running for some reason. He’s got to be criminal. So we have to shoot him, right?

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Cornelius Eady: The only way to deal with this is to shoot him. So, I think the da da de das are also trying to be a little sarcastic with that, right?

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Right.

Cornelius Eady: This idea of, you see how ridiculous this is? That we care more about the feelings of the killer than the victim. Poor Ty, he was just doing his duty, and look what he did, he had to kill somebody, and it upset him so much! Oh, poor guy. You know?

(POEM TO MUSIC FADES IN)

So the whole tableau there is something that we totally recognize because we’ve been seeing it time and time again, for the same circumstances. People have been saying this a lot, and I’ve been saying it maybe too often, but there’s that great quote by Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes.” And that’s true. This is rhyming. “Southern Cop” and Arbery and Eric Garner, they all rhyme.

(POEM TO MUSIC FADES IN AND ENDS)

Helena de Groot: I have one last question.

Cornelius Eady: Okay.

Helena de Groot: Why is Sterling Brown not more famous?

Cornelius Eady: There’s a number of theories on that. One is that his second book didn’t get published because the fad of the moment, basically, you know, the new Negro and the Harlem Renaissance had lost its novelty by the time his second book was about to be published. And so he couldn’t get a publisher for it. And he, you know, very resourcefully, decided just to start doing scholarship, which is what he did, you know. He didn’t stop writing poetry, but he concentrated on folklore and scholarship. Wrote some beautiful stuff. I mean, there’s a vast array of books, articles, interviews that he’s done on Black theater, Black life, Black folklore. Absolutely brilliantly written, but only reviewed as far as I could tell, seems to be only covered by Black press, in Black magazines, and no place else.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: But he did it, he got the job at Howard and stayed there for the rest of his career.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: But he could never get anyone interested in that second book also because, perceptions change. And even though people never thought of Sterling Brown the way they thought of Robert Hayden, he was old. And the stuff he was writing about to a lot of people’s perspective was this old stuff that we don’t want to talk about anymore, that blues stuff, and being back in the agrarian world of Jim Crow. And, you know, we went someplace else, we don’t want to talk about that anymore. I think he ran afoul of that. But, thanks to Michael Harper, he got pulled back in. Hopefully the reprinting of the Collected now will help get the attention he so richly deserves.

(MUSIC BEGINS)

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: You know, it’s a pity, I would say a sin, to forget our elder poets, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Cornelius Eady: It’s basically appreciating what they did in their circumstances, what they wrote, and what they contributed that’s now influencing us, that we have taken on and now we’re carrying forward.

(MUSIC PICKS UP AND CONTINUES)

Helena de Groot: Sterling Brown was the author of two poetry collections, Southern Road, published in 1932, and The Last Ride of Wild Bill, published more than 40 years later, in 1975. Just a few years after that, Michael S. Harper came out with The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown, which was republished just last year. Sterling Brown also wrote several works of literary criticism, and made invaluable contributions as an editor curating African American literature. In the late 1930s, for instance, he was the national editor of Negro Affairs for the Federal Writers’ Project, commissioning local guidebooks and oral histories that could have otherwise disappeared without a trace. He also coedited one of the most important compilations in African American literary history, The Negro Caravan, which came out in 1941, and made the case that oral sources of literature—spirituals, blues, work songs, ballads and folktales—were literature, too. If that sounds like common sense to you today, that’s in large part thanks to Sterling Brown.

Cornelius Eady has published eight volumes of poetry, among them Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; and Brutal Imagination, a National Book Award finalist. Cornelius Eady is also the cofounder of Cave Canem, with Toi Derricotte. And together with the band Rough Magic he set some 14 poems of Sterling Brown’s to music. You can check that out online or through Spotify. Just look for “The Sterling Brown Project.”

To find out more about Sterling Brown or Cornelius Eady, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode was by Cornelius Eady and Todd Sickafoose, and those beautiful recordings you heard of Sterling Brown reading his own poems are courtesy of the Library of Congress and the estate of Sterling Brown—thank you for letting us use them. I’m Helena de Groot, and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.

(MUSIC PLAYS AND FADES OUT)

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