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From Bronzeville to the Mecca and After: Gwendolyn Brooks and the Location of Black Identity

2015; Oxford University Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/melus/mlv049

1946-3170

Jeni Rinner,

Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

Gwendolyn Brooks’s reputation rightly places her as the Chicago poet of her time, and she was famously committed to writing about what she saw in her neighborhood: “I wrote about what I saw and heard in the street. I lived in a small second-floor apartment at the corner [in my twenties], and I could look first on one side and then on the other. There was my material” ( Report 134-35). Her material, most often, is people. In memorable portrait poems, Brooks explores a range of individual characters, from “chocolate Mabbie,” “Sadie and Maud,” and “Matthew Cole” in Bronzeville to “Way-Out Morgan,” “Hyena,” and “Boontsie De Broe” in the Mecca. 1 Her careful attention to these characters’ inner lives counters stereotypes and clichés that see blacks as mere curiosities: “[I]t is my privilege to state ‘Negros’ not as curios but as people” (146). Brooks maintained her unwavering focus on black people throughout her career, but the location of her subjects moved from Bronzeville to the Mecca and beyond, or “After” Mecca. 2 Brooks’s 1968 volume In the Mecca recognizes that the destruction of the Mecca building also resulted in the dispersal of the black community. Thousands of Mecca tenants struggled to find housing in other areas of Chicago’s “Black Belt,” and Bronzeville expanded beyond its boundaries. 3 In a 1969 interview, Brooks comments on the dissolution of Bronzeville: “I started out talking about Bronzeville, but ‘Bronzeville’s’ almost meaningless by now, I suppose, since Bronzeville has spread and spread and spread all over. . . . Once in a while you’ll see on a store ‘Bronzeville Tailor Shop’ or something like that, but almost nobody talks about Bronzeville” ( Report 160). When the Mecca building was destroyed, so, too, was the existence of a black street or building that provided Brooks with a structure for bringing together the black community. While “In the Mecca” (1968) successfully provides a “counter-memory” to prevailing racist myths of black life in that vast building, the poem is unable to find a place for black community there. 4