Sterling Brown's Poetry

Brown, Sterling. "Sterling Brown Poetry." The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David L. Lewis. New York: Penguin Viking, 1994. 227-37. Print.

I had a hard time reading some of the poems; the vernacular tended to stray beyond my comprehension and I think I lost a lot of the meaning. However, the first poem in the set, Southern Road, brought back memories of the John Henry stories I listened to as a kid. I’m not sure if he was always represented as a black man, but the videos I remember watching always made him such. The connection between the narrator of the poem and John Henry are pretty obvious; they both worked on railroads and had a difficult life.

The differences between the two men involve the issue of slavery. I’m not positive, but the man in the poem seems to either be a slave or be using the imagery of slavery to enhance his perception of the treatment of blacks during this time period. I choose to read it as the latter, which (I believe) does the poem more justice. The final, closing lines of the poem makes it seem as if the narrator is still a slave, despite not legally being one. Comparing slavery to the treatment and lifestyles of blacks in the early 20th century isn’t a far stretch (at least for some, especially in the South). Working harder and longer than white people just to get by and generally working for white people, blacks didn’t seem to have it much better than before slavery was abolished. The excerpt from Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine reinforces this: an extremely poor, black family who, although they are independent, still pick cotton to survive.

The rest of the poems furthered this image of black-ness not changing despite the changes in laws and society. Odyssey of a Big Boy discusses the different jobs a black man has had, none of which he liked and all of which involved the types of manual labor he or his fathers did before as slaves. I’m sure other poems in this section do much the same thing, but like I said, the dialect is difficult to transcribe and the meaning is lost.