IN THK MECCA

Books by Gwendolyn Brooks

Poetry
In the Mecca
Selected Poems
The Bean Eaters
Bronzeville Boys and Girls (for children)
Annie Allen
A Street in Bronzeville
Fiction
Maud Martha
IN THE MECCA

poems by

GWENDOLYN BROOKS

tE
3837
HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK, EVANSTON, AND LONDON
 LOAN STACK

IN THE MECCA. Copyright © 1964, 196^, 196"], 1968 by Gwendolyn Brooks

Blakely. Printed in the United States oj Avierica. All rights reserved. No
part oj this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission except in the case oj brief quotations embodied
in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper Row,
Publishers, Incorporated, 49 East 33rd Street, New York, N. Y. 10016.

LIBRARY ,OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 68-26544

I-S
 PS3503
' BrTdTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Parts of this book were first published

by the following: Negro Digest, Chicago
Magazine, Broadside Press, Journal of
Black Poetry, Sisters Today

443
T0 the memory of Langston Hughes;
and to James Baldwin, LeRoi Jones,
and Mike Alexandroff,
educators extraordinaire
 CONTENTS

IN THE MECCA
- IN THE MECCA J

AFTER MECCA
TO A WINTER SQUIRREL

BOY BREAKING GLASS ^6

MEDGAR EVERS ^8
MALCOLM X yy

Tido Dedications
I. THE CHICAGO PICASSO
II. THE WALL ^2

The Blackstone Rangers

I. AS SEEN BY DISCIPLINES
II. THE LEADERS

III. GANG GIRLS ^7

THE SERMON ON THE WARPLAND ^5?

THE SECOND SERMON ON THE WARPLAND y/

vii
IN THE MECCA
 • • a great gray hulk of brick, four stories high,
topped by an ungainly smokestack, ancient and enormous,
filling half the block north of Thirty-fourth Street
between State and Dearborn .. . the Mecca Building. . . .
The Mecca Building is 17-shaped. The dirt courtyard is
littered with newspapers and tin cans, milk cartons and
broken glass.. .. Iron fire escapes run up the building’s
face and ladders reach from them to the roof. There are
four main entrances, two on Dearborn and two on State
Street. At each is a gray stone threshold and over
each is carved ‘The Mecca.’ (The Mecca was constructed
as an apartment building in 1891, a splendid palace,
a showplace of Chicago. . . .)”
—JOHN BARTLOW MARTIN

“How many people live here? . . . Two thousand? oh, more

than that. There’s 176 apartments and some of ’em’s got
seven rooms and they’re ail full.”
—A MECCAN

. . there’s danger in my neighborhood. . . .”

—RICHARD “peanut” WASHINGTON

“There comes a time when what has been can never be again.”
—RUSS MEEK
IN TRIBUTE—

Jim Cunningham, Jim Taylor, Mi^e. Cook,

Walter Bradford, Don Lee, Curtis Ellis,
Roy Lewis, Peggy Susberry, Ronda Davis,
Carolyn Rodgers, Sharon Scott,
Alicia Johnson, Jewel Latimore
Now the way of the M6cca was on this wise.

t
Sit where the light corrupts your face.
Mies Vau der Rohe retires from grace.
And the fair fables fall.

S. Smith is Mrs. Sallie. Mrs. Sallie

hies home to Mecca, hies to marvelous rest;
ascends the sick and influential stair.
The eye unrinsed, the mouth absurd
with the last sourings of the master’s Feast.
She plans
to set severity apart,
to unclench the heavy folly of the fist.
Infirm booms
and suns that have not spoken die behind this
low-brown butterball. Our prudent partridge.
A fragmentary attar and armed coma.
A fugitive attarand a -district hymn.

Sees old St. Julia Jones, who has had prayer,

and who is rising from amenable knees

5
inside; the wide-flung door of 215.
“Isn’t He wonderfulwonderful! ” cries St. Julia.
“Isn’t our Lord the greatest to the brim?
The light of my life. And I lie late
past the still pastures. And meadows. He’s the comfort
and wine and piccalilli for my soul.
He hunts me up the coffee for my cup.
Oh how I love that Lord.”
And Mrs. Sallie,
all innocent of saints and signatures,
nods and consents, content to endorse
Lord as an incense and a vintage. Speaks
to Prophet Williams, young beyond St. Julia,
and rich with Bible, pimples, pout: who reeks
with lust for his disciple, is an engine
of candid steel hugging combustibles.
His wife she was a skeleton.
His wife she was a bone.
Ida died in self-defense.
(Kinswomen!
Kinswomen!)
Ida died alone.

Out of her dusty threshold bursts Hyena.

The striking de()utante. A fancier of firsts.
One of the first, and to the tune of haje,
in all the Mecca to paint her hair sun-gold.
And Mrs.
Sallie sees Alfred. Ah, his God!—
1 To create! To create! To bend with the tight intentness
over the neat detail, come to
a terrified standstill of the heart, then shiver.

6
 then rush—successfully—
at that rebuking thing, that obstinate and
recalcitrant little beast, the phrase!
To have the joy of deciding—successfully— —
how stuffs can be compounded or sifted out
^nd emphasized; what the importances are;
what coats in which to wrap things. Alfred is un-
talented. Knows. Marks time and themes at Phillips,
stares, glares, of mornings, at a smear
which does not care what he may claim or doubt
or probe or clear or want, or what he might have been.
I He “fails” no one; a,t faculty lunch hour
allows the zoology teacher, who has great legs,
to fondle him and curse his pretty h^ir. He
reads Shakespeare in the evenings or reads Joyce
or James or Horace, Huxley, Hemingway.
Later, he goes to bed with Telly Bell
in 309, or with that golden girl,
or thinks, or drinks until the Everything
is vaguely a part of One thing and the One thing
delightfully anonymous
and undiscoverable. So he is weak^
is weak, is no good. Never mind.
It is a decent enough no-goodness. And it is
a talkative, curly, charitable, spiced weakness
which makes a woman in charge of zoology
dream furiously at night.
When there were all those gods
administering to panthers,
jumping over mountains,
and lighting stars and comets and a moon,
what was their one Belief.^

7
 what was their joining thing?

A boy breaks glass and Mrs. Sallie

rises to the final and fourth floor.
-1

Children, what she has brought you is hock of ham.

She puts the pieces to boil in white enamel, right
already with water of many seasonings, at phe back
of the cruel stoye. And mustard mestnerized by
eldest daughter, the Undaunted (she who once
pushed her thumbs in the eyes of a Thief), awaits
the clever hand. Six ruddy yams abide, and
cornbread made with water.

Now Mrs. Sallie

confers her bjrd-hat to her kitchen table,
and sees her kitchen. It is bad, is bad,
her eyes say, and My soft antagonist,
her eyes say, and My headlong tax and mote,
her eyes say, and My maniac default,
my least light.
! “But all my lights are little! ”
Her denunciation
slaps savagely not only this sick kitchen but
her Lord’s annulment of the main event.
I “I want to decorate! ” But what is that? A
pomade atop a sewage. An offense.
First comes correctness, then embellishment!
And music, mode, and mixed philosophy
may follow fitly on propriety
to tame the whiskey of our discontent!
“What can I do? ”
But World (a sheep)

8
wants to be Told.
If you ask a question, you
can’t stop there.
You must k^ep going.
You can’t stop there: World will
waive;, will be
facetious, angry. You can’t stop there.
You have to keep on going.

Doublemint as a protective device. Yvonne

prepares for her lover.
Gum is something he can certify.
Gum is something he can understand.
A tough girl gets it. A rough
Ruthie or Sue. It is unembarrassable,
and will seem likely. It is very bad,
but in its badness it is nearly grand,
and is a crown that tops bald innocence
and gentle fright.
It is not necessary, says Yvonne,
to have every day him whom
to the end thereof you will love.
Because it is tasty to remember
he is alive, and laughs
in somebody else’s room,
or is^ slicing a cold cucumber,
or is buttoning his cuffs,
or is signing with his pen
and will plan
to touch you again. .

Melodie Mary hates everything pretty,and plump.

And Melodie, Cap and Casey

9
 and Thomas Earl, Tennessee, Emmett and Briggs
hate sewn suburbs;
hate everything combed and strong; hate people who
have balls, dolls, mittens and dimity frocks and trains
and boxing gloves, picture books, bonnets for Easter.
Lace handkerchief owners areenemies-ofBmithkind.

Melodie Mary likes roaches,

and pities the gray rat.
To delicate Melodie Mary
headlines are secondary. ,
It is interesting that in China
the children blanch and scream,
and that blood runs like a ragged wound
through the ancient flesh of the land.
It matters, mildly,
that the Chinese girls are grim,
and that hurried are the seizures
of yellow hand on hand....
What if they drop like the tumbling tears
of the old and intelligent sky?
Where are the frantic bulletins
when other importances die?
I Trapped in his privacy of pain
the worried rat expires,
and smashed in the grind of a rapid heel
last night’s roaches lie.

Briggs is adult as a stone

(who if he cries cries alone).
The Gangs are out, but he must go
to and fro,
appease what reticences move

IO
across the intemperate range. .
Immunity is forfeit, love
is luggage, hope is heresy.
Gang
is health and mange.
Gang z
is a bunch of ones and a singlicity.
Please pity Briggs. But there is a central height in pity
past which man’s hand and sympathy cannot go;
past which the little hurt dog
descends to mass—no longer Joe,
not Bucky, not Cap’n, not Rex,
not Briggs—and is all self-employed,
concerned with Other,
hot with Us.
Briggs, how “easy,” finally, to accept (after the shriek and
repulsion)
the unacceptable evil. To proceed with some eclat;
some salvation of the face;
awake! to choke the chickens, file their blood.

One reason cats are happier than people

is that they have no newspapers ... I must be,
culls Tennessee,
like my cat, content to gaze
at men and women spurting here and there.
I must sit, let
them stroke me as and When they will;
must drink their milk and cry
for meat. At other.times 1 roust be still.
Who tingles in
and mixes with affairs and others met /
comes out with scratches and is very thin

11
and rides the red possession of regret.

In the midst
of hells and gruels and little halloweens
tense Thomas Earl loves Johnny Appleseed.
“I, Johnny Appleseed.” ------ -------—
It is hard to be Johnny Appleseed.
The ground shudders.
The ground springs up;
hits you with gnarls and rust,
derangement and fever, or blare and' clerical treasons.

Eknmett and Cap and Casey

are skin wiped over bones
for lack of chub and chocolate
andice cream cones,
for lack of English muffins
and boysenberry jam.
What shall their redeemer be.?
Greens and hock of ham.
For each his greens and hock of ham
and a spoon of sweet potato.

Alfred sayS:
The faithless world!
betraying yet again
trinities!
My chaste displeasure
is not enough;
the brilliant British of the new command
is not enough;
the counsels of division, the hot counsels.

12
the scuffle and short pout
are not enough, are only
a pressure of clankings and affinities
against
the durable fictions of a Charming Trash.
Mrs. Sallie
evokes and loves and loathes a pink-lit image
of the toy-child. Her Lady’s.
Her Lady’s pink convulsion,-toy-child dances
in stiff wide pink through Mrs. Sallie. Stiff pink is
on toy-child’s poverty of cream
under a shiny tended warp of gold.
What shiny tended gold is an aubade
for toy-child’s head! Has ribbons too!
Ribbons. Not Woolworth cotton comedy,
not rubber band, not string....
“And that would be my baby be my baby....
And I would be my lady I my lady....”

What else is there to say but everything?

SUDDENLY, COUNTING NOSES, MRS. SALLIE

SEES NO PEPITA. “WHERE PEPITA BE?”

... Cap, where Pepita? Casey, where Pepita?

Emmett and Melodie Mary, where Pepita?
Briggs, Tennessee, Yvonne, and Thomas Earl,
where may our SPepita be?—
our Woman with her terrible eye,
with iron and feathers in hcrficer,
with all her songs so lemon-sweet,
with lightning and a candle too

13
 and junk and jewels too?
My heart begins to race.
I fear the end of Peace.

A in seen er I ain seen er 1 ain seen er

Ain seen er I ain seeiifij: I ain seen er

Yvonne up-ends her iron. And is constrained.

Cannot now conjure love-within-the-park.
Cannot now conjure spice and soft explosion
mixing with miffed mosquitoes where the dark'
defines and re-defines.

And Melodie Mary

and Thomas Earl and Tennessee and Briggs
5 yield cat-contentment gangs rats Appleseed.

Emmett and Cap and Casey t

yield visions of vice and veal,
dimes and wiildy carnival,
candied orange peel,
peppermint in a pickle;
and where the ladybug
glistens in her leaf-hammock; light
lasses to hiss and hug.

And they are constrained. All are constrained.

And there is no thinking of grapes or gold
or of any wicked sweetness and they ride
upon fright and remorse and their stomachs
- - are rags or grit.
In twos!
In threes! Knock-knocking down the martyred halls

14
at doors behind whose yelling oak or pine
many flowers start, choke, reach up,
want help, get it, do not get it,
rally, bloom, or die on the wasting vine.

“One of my children is missing. One of my children is gone.”

Great-great Gram hobbles, fumbles at the knob,

mumbles, “I ain seen no Pepita. But
I remember our cabin. The floor was dirt.
And something crawled in it. That is the thought
stays in my mind. I do not recollect
what ’twas. But something. Something creebled in that dirt
for we wee ones to pop. Kept popping at it.
Something that squishied. Then your heel come down!
I hear them squishies now.... Pop, Pernie May!
That’s sister Pernie. That’s my sister Pernie.
Squish.... Out would jump her little heel.
And that was the end of Something. Sister Pernie
was our best popper. Pern and me and all,
we had no beds. Some slaves had beds of hay
or straw, with cover-cloth. We six-uns curled
in corners of the dirt, and closed our eyes,
and went to sleep—or listened to the rain
fall inside, felt the drops
big on our noses, bummies and tum-tums....”

Although he has not seen Pepita, Loam

Norton considers Belsen and Dachau, ,
regrets all old unkindnesscs-and harms.
.., The Lord was their shepherd.
Yet did they want.
Joyfully would they have lain in jungles or pastures.

15
walked beside waters. Their gaunt
souls were not restored, their souls were banished.
In the shadow valley
they feared the evil, whether with or without God.
They wfere comforted by no Rod,
no Staff,, but flayed by, O besieged by, shot a-plenty.
The prepared table was the rot or curd of the day.
Anointings were of lice. Blood was the spillage of cups.
Goodness and mercy should follow them
all the days of their death. ’
They should dwell in the house of the Lord forever
and, dwelling, save a place for me.
I am not remote,
not unconcerned....

Boontsie De Broe has

not seen Pepita Smith; but is
a Lady
among Last Ladies,.
Efect. Direct.
An engraving on the crowd, the blurred crowd.
She is away and fond.
Her clear voice tells you life may be controlled.
Her clear mind is the extract
of massive literatures, of lores,
\transactions of old ocean; suffrages.

Yvonne
recovers to aver
despite the stomp of the stupor.
She will not go
in Hudson’s hashhouse. And the Tivoli
is a muffler of Love.

i6
 In the blase park,
that winks and mocks but is at all times
tolerant of the virtuous defect, of audit,
gnd of mangle and of wile, he
may permit perusal of their ground,
its rubble-over-rose: may look to rainbow:
Qiay sanction bridal tulle, white flowers,
■ may allow a mention of a minister and twins....

But other Smiths are twitching. They recall

vain vagrants, recall old peddlers, young fine fiumlets.
The Man Who Sells The Peaches Plums Bananas.
They recall the Fuller Brush Man,
oblique and delicate, who tries on
the very fit and feature of despair.
“Pepita’s smart, ’ ’ says Sallie; her stretched eyes
reject the exact despatches of a mind turned boiler, >
epithet, foiler, guillotine. What
of the Bad Old Man? the lover-like young man? the
half-mad boy who put his hand across Pepita’s knee?
“Pepita’s smart,” says Sallie.
Knowing the ham hocks are burning at the bottom of the pan.

S. and eight of her children reach their door. The

* door says, “What are you doing here? and where
isPepita the puny—the halted, glad-sad child?”
They pet themselves, subdue
(he legislation of their yoke and devils.
Has just wandered!
I Has just blundered
away
from her own.
And there’s no worry

17
 that’s necessary.
She
comes soon alone.
Comes soon alone or will be brought by neighbor.
Kind neighbor.

“Kind neighbor.” They consider.

Suddenly
every one in the world is Mean.
Could that old woman, passively passing, mash a child?
Has she tot’s head in that shiny bag?
And that lank fellow looking furtive.
What
cold poison could he spew, what stench commit
upon a little girl, a little lost girl,
lone and languid in the world, wanting
her ma, her glad-sad, her Yvonne?

Emmett runs down the hall.

Empett seizes John Tom’s telephone.
(Despite the terror and the derivation,
despite the not avuncular frontier,
JolmTom, twice forty in 420, claims
Life sits or blazes in this Mecca.
And thereby—tenable.
And thereby beautiful.)

Provoking calm and dalliance of the Law.

How shall the Law allow for littleness!
How shall the Law enchief the chapters of
wee brown-black chime, wee brown-black chastity?

The Law arrives—and does not quickly go

18
to fetch a Female of the Negro Race.
A lariat of questions.
The mother screams and wants her baby. Wants her baby,
and wants her baby wants her baby.

Law leaves, with likeness of a “southern” belle. Sheriffs,

South State Street is a Postulate!
Until you look. You look—and you discover
the paper dolls are terrible. You touch.
You look and touch.
The paper dolls are terrible and cold.

Aunt Dill arrives to help them. “Little gal got

raped and choked to death last week. Her gingham
was tied around her neck and it was red
but had been green before with pearls and dots
of rhinestone on the collar, and her tongue •
was hanging out (a little to the side);
her eye was all a-pop, one was; was one
all gone. Part of her little nose was gone
(bit off, the Officer said). The Officer said
that something not quite right been done that girl.
Lived Langley: ’round the corner from my house.”
Aunt Dill extends
sinister pianissimos and apples,
and at that moment of the Thousand Souls is
a Christ-like creature; Doing Good.

The Law returns. It trots about the Mecca.

It pounds a dozen doors.

No, Alfred has not seen Pepita Smith.

But he (who might have been an architect)

19
 can speak of Mecca: firm arms surround
disorders, bruising ruses and small hells,
small semiheavens: hug barbarous rhetoric
built of buzz, coma and petite pell-ihells. '
No, Alfred has not seen Pepita Smith.
But he (who might have been a poet-king)
can speak superbly of the line of Leopold.
The line of Leopold is thick with blackness
and Scriptural drops and rises.
The line of Leopold is busy with betrothals of royal rage
and conditional pardon and with
refusal of mothballs for outmoded love.
Senghof will not shred
love,
gargantuan gardens careful in the sun,
fairy story gold, thrones, feasts, the three princesses,
summer sailboats
like cartoon ghosts or Klarismen, pointing up
white questions, in blue air....
• No.
Believes in beauty.
' But believes that blackness is among the fit filters.
Old cobra
coughs and curdles in his lungs,
spits spite, spits exquisite spite, and cries, “Ignoble!”
Needs “negritude.”
Senghor (in Europe rootless and lonely) sings in art-lines
df Black Woman.
Senghor sighs and, “negritude” needing,
speaks for others, for brothers. Alfred can tell of
Poet, and muller, and President of Senegal, who
in voice and body

20
loves sun,
listens
to the rich ]pound in and beneath the black feet of Africa.

Hyena, the striking debutante, is back;

bathed, used by special oils and fumes, will be
off to the Ball tonight. She has not seen
Pepita—“a puny and a putrid little child.”

Death is easy.
It may come quickly.
It may come when nobody is ready.
Death may come at any time. Mazola
has never known Pepita S. but knows
the strangest thing is when the stretcher goes!—
the elegant hucksters bearing the body when the body
leaves its late lair the last time leaves.
With no plans for return.

Don Lee wants

not a various America.
Don Lee wants
a new nation
under no^ng;
a physical light that waxes; he does not want to
be exorcised, adjoining and revered;
he does not like a local garniture
npr any impish onus in the vogue;
is' nof candlelit
but stands out in the auspices of fire
and rock and jungle-flail;.
wants

21
new art and anthem; will
want a new music screaming in the sun.

Says Alfred:
To be a red bush!
In the West Virginia autumn.
To flame out red.
“Crimson” is not word enough,
although close to what I mean.
How proud.
How proud.
(But the bush does not know it flames.) v

“Takes time,” grated the gradualist.

“Starting from when?” asked Amos.
Amo^ (not Alfred) says,
“Shall we sit on ourselves; shall we wait behind roses and veils
for mbnsters to maul us,
for bulls to come butt us forever and ever,
shall we scratch in our blood,
point air-powered hands at our wounds,
reflect on the aim of our bulls? ” And Amos
(not Alfred) prays, for America prays:
“Bathe her in her beautiful blood.
A long blood bath will wash her pure.
Her skin needs special care.
Let this good rage continue out beyond
her power to believe or to surmise.
Slap the false sweetness from that face.
Great-nailed boots
must kick her prostrate, heel-grind that soft breast,
outrage her saucy pride,
remove her fair fine mask.

22
Let her lie there, panting and wild, her pain
red, running roughly through the illustrious ruin—
with nothing to do but think, think
of how she was so long grand,
flogging her dark one with her own hand, j
watching in meek amusement while he bled.
Then shall she rise, recover.
Never to forget.”

The ballad of Edie Barrow:

I fell in love with a Gentile boy.
All creamy-and-golden fair.
He looked deep and long in my long black eyes.
And he played with rtiy long black hair.
He took me away to his summertime house.
He was wondrous wealthy, was he.
And there in the hot black drapes of night
he whispered, “Good lovers are we.”
Close was our flesh through the winking hours,
closely and sweetly entwined.
Love did not guess in the tight-packed dark
it was flesh of varying kind.
Scarletly back when the hateful sun
came bragging across the town.
And I could have killed the gentle Gentile
wl|o waited to strap him down.
He will wed her come fall, come falling of fall.
Arid she will be queen of his rest.
I skalf be queen of his summerhouse storm.
A hungry tooth in my breast.

“Pepita who?” And Prophet Williams yawns.

Prophet Williams’ office in the Mecca

2.3
has a soiled window and a torn front sign.
His suit is shabby and slick.
He is not poor (clothes do not make the man).
He has a lawyer named Enrico Jason,
who talks. The Prophet advertises
in every Colored journal in the world....
An old woman wants
from the most reverend Prophet of all prophets
a piece of cloth, licked by his Second Tongue,-
to wrap around her paralytic leg.
Men with malicious sweethearts, evil sweethearts
bringers of bad, bringers of tedium­
want Holy Thunderbolts, and Love Balk too.
And all want lucky numbers all the time.
Mallis (the Superintendent of six secretaries)
types. Mallie alone may know
the Combinations:
14-15-16
and 13-14-15-•• •
(magic is Cut-out Number Forty-three).
Prophet will help you hold your Job, solve problems,
and, like a Sister Stella in Blue Island,
“can call your friends and enemies by name
- without a single clue.”
There is no need to visit in Blue Island.
Prophet will give you trading stamps and kisses,
or a cigar.
One visit will convince you.
Lucky days
and Lucky Hands. Lifts you
from Sorrow and the Shadows. Heals the body.
A Sister Mario on east Sixty-third
announces One

24
Visit Can Keep You Out of the Insane Asylum,
but
she stocks no Special Holiday Blessings for
Columbus Day and Christmas, nor keeps off
green devils and orange witches with striped fangs.
Prophet
has Drawing and Holding Powder, Attraction Powder, Black
Cat Powder, Powerful Serum,
“Marvelous Potency Number T^inety-one”
(which stoppeth husbands and lovers from dastardy).
Pay-check Fluid, Runriing-around Elixir,
Policy Number Compeller, Voodoo Potion.
Enrico Jason, a glossy circular blackness, who
sees Lawmen and enhances Lawmen, soon
will lie beside his Prophet in bright blood,
a rhythm of stillness
above the nuances.

How many care, Pepita?—

Staley and Lara,
the victim grasped, the harlot had and gone?
Eunie, the intimate tornado?
Simpson, the peasant king, Bixby and June,
the hollowed, the scant, the
P ayed-out deformities? the margins?
ot those.
ot these three Maries
with warm unwary mouths and asking eyes
wide open, full of vagueness and surprise;
the limp ladies
(two in awful combat now:
a terrible battle of the Old:
speechless and physical: oh horrible

25
the obscene gruntings
the dull outwittings
the flabby semi-rhythmic shufflings
the blear starings
the small spittings).
Not Great-uncle Beer, white-headed twinkly man!—
laugher joker gambler killer too.
Great-uncle Beer says, “Casey Jones.
Yes, Casey Jones is still alive,
a chicken on his head.”
Not Wezlyn, the wandering woman, the woman who wanders
the halls of the Mecca at night, in search
of Lawrence and Love.
Not Insane Sophie! If
you scream, you’re marked “insane.”
But silence is a place in which to scream!
Hush.
An agitation in the bush.
Occluded trees.
Mhd life heralding the blue heat of God
snickers in a comer of the west windowsill.
“What have I done, and to the world,
and to the love I promised Mother?”
An agitation in occluded trees.
The fires run up. Things slant.
The pillow’s wet.
The fires run down and flatten.
(The grilles will dance over glass!)
You’re marked “insane.”
You cower.
Suddenly you’re no longer
well-dressed. You’re not
pretty in halls.

26
Like the others you want love, but
a cage is imminent.
Your doil is near. And will go with you.
Your doll, whom none will stun.

... How many care, Pepita?

Does Darkara?
Darkara looks at Vvgue. Darkara sees
a mischievous impromptu and a sheen.
(In Palm Beach, Florida, Laddie Sanford says;
“I call it My Ocean. Of course, it’s the Atlantic.”)
The painter, butcher, stockyards man, the Typist,
Aunt Tippi^i Zombie Bell,
Mr. Kelly with long gray hair who begs
subtly from door to door. Gas Cady
the man who robbed J. Harrison’s grave of mums
and left the peony bush only because
it was too big (said Mama), the janitor
who is a Political Person, Queenie King who
is an old poem silvering the noise,
and Wallace Williams who knows the
Way the Thing Is Supposed To Be Done—
these little care, Pepita, what befalls a '
nullified saint or forfeiture (or child).

Alfred’s Impression—his Apologie—

his Invocation—and his Ecstasie;
“Not Baudelaire, Bob Browning, not Neruda.
Giants over Steeples
aije wanted in this Crazy-eyes, this Scar.
A violent reverse.
We part from all we thought we knew of love z
and of dismay-with-flags-on. What we know

27
I is that there are confusion and conclusion.
1 Rending.
Even the hardest parting is a contribution....
What shall we say?
FarcTDell. And Hail! Until Farewell again.”

Officers!—
do you nearly wish you had not come into this room?
The sixtyish sisters, the twins with the floured faces,
who dress in long stiff blackness,
who exit stiffly together and enter together
stiffly,
muffle their Mahler, finish their tea,
stare at the lips of the Law—
but have not seen Pepita anywhere.
They pull on their long white gloves,
they flour their floured faces,
and Stiffly leave Law and the Mecca.

Way-out Morgan is collecting guns

in a tiny fourth-floor room.
He is not hungry, ever, though sinfully lean.
He flourishes, ever, on porridge or pat of bean
pudding or wiener soup—fills fearsomely
on visions of Death-to-the-Hordes-of-the-White-Men!
Death!
(This is the Maxim painted in big black
above a bed bought at a Champlain rummage sale.)
Remembering three local-and-legal beatings, he
rubs his hands in glee,
does Way-out Morgan. Remembering his Sister
mob-raped in Mississippi, Way-out Morgan
smacks sweet his lips and adds another gun

28
and listens to Blackness stern and blunt and beautiful,
organ-rich Blackness telling a terrible story.
Way-out Morgan
predicts the Day of Debt-pay shall begin,
the Day of Demon-diamond,
of blood in mouths and body-mouths,
of flesh-rip in the Forum of Justice at last!
Remembering mates in the Mississippi River,
mates with black bodies once majestic. Way-out
postpones a yellow woman in his bed, postpones
wetnesses and little cries and stomachings—
to consider Ruin.

“Pepita? No.”
Marian is mixing.
Take Marian mixing. Gumbo File or roux.
At iron: at ire with faucet, husband, young.
Knows no
gold hour.
Sings
but sparsely, and subscribes to axioms
atop her gargoyles and tamed foam. Good axioms.
Craves crime: her murder, her deep wounding, or
a leprosy so lovely as to pop
the slights and sleep of her community.
her Mecca.
A Thing. To make the people heel and stop
and See her.
Never strides
about, up!
Never alters earth or air!
Her children cannot quake, be proud.
Her husband never Saw her, never said

29
her single silver certain Self aloud.

Pops Pinkham, forgetting Pepita,

is somewhat doubtful of a specific right
to inherit the earth or to partake of it now....

Old women should not seek to be perfumed, said Plutarch.

But Dill, the kind of woman you
peek at in passing and thank your God or zodiac you
may never have to know, puts on Tabu.
Aunt Dill is happy. Nine years Little Papa
has been completely at rest in Lincoln Cemetery.
Children were stillbirths all. Aunt Dill
has bits of brass and marble, and Franciscan
china; has crocheted doilies; has old mahogany,
polished till it burns with a smothered glow; has
antimacassars,- spreads, silk draperies,
her silver creamer and her iron lamp,
her piece of porcelain, her seventeen
(Really Nice handkerchiefs pressed in cedar. Dill
is woman-in-Jove-with-God.
Is not
true-child-of-God—for are we ever to
be children.^—are we never to mature,
be lovely lovely? be soft Woman
rounded and darling... almost caressable ...
and. certainly wearing Tabi(, in the name of the Lord.
Dill straightens—tries to forget the hand of God
(... which would be skillful... would be flattering . ..)

I hate it.
Yet, murmurs Alfred—

30
who is lean at the balcony, leaning— ’>
something, something in Mecca
continues to call! Substanceless; yet like mountains,
like rivers and oceans too; and like trees
with wind whistling through them. And steadily
an essential sanity, black and electric,
builds to a reportage and redemption.
A hot estrangement.
A material collapse
that is Construction.

Hateful things sometimes befall the hateful

but the hateful are not rendered lovable thereby.
The murderer of Pepita
looks at the Law unlovably. Jamaican
Edward denies and thrice denies a dealing
of any dimension with Mrs. Sallie’s daughter.
Beneath his cot
a little woman lies in dust with roaches.
She never went to kindergarten.
She never learned that black is not beloved. I
Was royalty when poised,
sly, at the A and P’s fly-open door.
Will be royalty no more.
“I touch”—she said once—“petals of a rose, j
A silky feeling through me goes!” /
H^r mother will try for roses.

She whose little stomach fought the world had

wriggled, like a robin!
odd were the little wrigglings
and the chopped chirpings oddly rising.

31
AFTER MECCA
 TO A WINTER SQUIRREL

That is the way God made you.

And what is wrong with it? Why, nothing.
Except that you are cold and cannot cook.

Merdice can cook. Merdice

of murdered heart and docked sarcastic soul,
Merdice
the bolted nomad, on a winter noon
cooks guts; and sits in gas. (She has no shawl, her
landlord has no coal.)

You out beyond the shellac of her look

and of her sill!
She envies you your furry
buffoonery
tnat enfolds your silver skill.
^he thinks you are a mountain and a star, unbaffleable;
with sentient twitch and scurry.

35
 BOY BREAKING GLASS
To Marc Cra'wford
]rom 'cohom the covrmisswin

Whose broken window is a cry of art

(success, that winks aware
as elegance, as a treasonable faith)
is raw: is sonic: is old-eyed premiere.
Our li^autiful flaw and terrible ornament.
Our barbarous and metal little man.

“I shall create! If not a note, a hole.

If not an overture, a desecration.” •

Full of pepper and light

and Salt and night and cargoes.

“Don’t go down the plank

if you see there’s no extension.
Each to his grief, each to
his loneliness and fidgety revenge.

36
Nobody knew where I was and now I am no longer there.”

The only sanity is a cup of tea.

The music is in minors.

Each one other

is having different weather.

“It was you, it was you who threw away my name!

And this is everything I have for me.”

Who has not Congress, lobster, love, luau,

the Regency Room, the Statue of Liberty,
runs. A sloppy amalgamation.
A nlistake.
A cliff.
A hymn, a snare, and an exceeding sun.

37
 MEDGAR EVERS
For Charles Evers

The man whose height his fear improved he

arranged to fear no further. The raw
intoxicated time was time for better birth or
a final death.

Old' styles, old tempos, all the engagement of

the day—the sedate, the regulated fray—
the antique light, the Moral rose, old gusts,
tight whistlings from the past, the mothballs
in the Love at last our man forswore.

Medgar Evers annoyed confetti and assorted

brands of businessmen’s eyes.

The shows came down: to maxims and surprise.

And palsy.

Roaring no rapt arise-ye to the dead, he

leaned across tomorrow. People said that
he was holding clean globes in his hands.

38
 MALCOLM X
For Dudley Randall

Original.
Ragged-round.
Rich-robust.

He had the hawk-man’s eyes.

We gasped. We saw the maleness.
The maleness raking out and making guttural the air
and pushing us to walls.

And in a soft and fundamental hour

a sorcery devout and vertical
bellied the world.

He opened us—
who was a key, .

who Was a man.

39
 TWO DEDICATIONS

I
THE CHICAGO PICASSO
August 1^6'1

“Mayor Daley tugged a white ribbon, loosing the

blue percale wrap. A hearty cheer went up as the
covering slipped off the big steel sculpture that
looks at once like a bird and a woman.”
—Chicago Sun-Times

(Seiji Oza'wtt leads the Symphony.

The Mayor smiles.
And yOjOoo See.)

Does man love Art? Man visits Art, but squirms.

Art hurts. Art urges voyages—
and it is easier to stay at home,
the nice beer ready.
In commonrpoms
we belch, or sniff, or scratch.
Are raw.

But we must cook ourselves and style ourselves for Art, who
is a requiring courtesan.
We squirm.
We do not hug the Mona Lisa.
We
may touch or tolerate
an astounding fountain, or a horse-and-rider.
At most, another Lion.

Observe the tall cold of a Flower

which is as innocent and as guilty,
as meaningful and .as meaningless as any
other flower in the western field.

41
 II
THE WALL
August 2’], 1^6']
For Edavard Christmas

“The side wall of a typical slum building on the

corner of 43rd and Langley became a mural com­
municating black dignity. . .
—Ebony

A drumdrumdrum.
Humbly we come.
South of success and east of gloss and glass are
sandals;
flowercloth;
gr^ve hoops of wood or gold, pendant
from black ears, brown ears, reddish-brown
and iyory ears;

black boy-men.
Black
boy-men on roofs fist out “Black Power!” Vai,
a little black stampede
in African
images of brass and flowerswirl,
fists out “Black Power!”—tightens pretty eyes,
leans back on mothercountry and is tract,
is treatise through her perfect and tight teeth.

Women in wool hair chant their poetry.

42
Phil Cohran gives us messages and music
made of developed bone and polished and honed cult.
It is the Hour of tribe and of vibration,
the day-long Hour. It is the Hour
of ringing, rouse, of ferment-festival.

On Forty-third and Langley

black furnaces resent ancient
legislatures
of ploy and scruple and practical gelatin.
They keep the fever in,
fondle the fever.

All
worship the Wall.

I mount the rattling wood. Walter

says, “She is good.” Says, “She
our Sister is.” In front of me
hundreds of faces, red-brown, brown, black, ivory,
yield me hot trust, their yea and their Announcement
that they are ready to rile the high-flung ground.
Behind me. Paint.
Heroes.
No child has defiled
th^ Heroes of this Wall this serious Appointment
this still Wing
this Scald this Flute this heavy Light this Hinge.
1 '
An emphasis is paroled.
The old decapitations are revised,
the dispossessions beakless.

And we sing.
 THE BLACKSTONE EANGERS

I
AS SEEN BY DISCIPLINES

There they are.

Thirty at the corner.
Black, raw, ready.
Sores in the city
that do not want to heal.

44
 II
THE LEADERS

Jeff. Gene. Geronimo. And Bop.

They cancel, cure and curry.
Hardly the dupes of the downtown thing
the cold bonbon,
the rhinestone thing. And hardly
in a hurry.
Hardly Belafonte, King,
Black Jesus, Stokely, Malcolm X or Rap.
Bungled trophies.
Their country is a Nation on no map.

Jeff, Gene, Geronimo and Bop

in I the passionate noon,
inj bewitching night
arb the detailed men, the copious men.
They curry, cure,
they cancel, cancelled images whose Concerts
are not divine, vivacious; the different tins
are intense last entries; pagan argument;

45
translations of the night.

The Blackstone bitter bureaus

(bureaucracy is footloose) edit, fuse
unfashionable damnations and descent;
and exulting, monstrous hand on monstrous hand,
construct, strangely, a monstrous pearl or grace.
 Ill
GANG GIRLS
A Rangerette

Gang Girls are sweet exotics.

Mary Ann
uses the nutrients of her orient,
but sometimes sighs for Cities of blue and jewel
beyond her Ranger rim of Cottage Grove.
(Bowery Boys, Disciples, Whip-Birds will
dissolve no margins, stop no savory sanctities.)

Mary is
a rose in a whiskey glass.

Miry’s
Februaries shudder and are gone. Aprils
fret frankly, lilac hurries on.
Summer is a hard irregular ridge.
October looks away.
And that’s the Year!
Save for her bugle-love.
Save for the bleat of not-obese devotion.

47
Save for Somebody Terribly Dying, under
the philanthropy of robins. Save for her Ranger
bringing
an amount of rainbow in a string-drawn bag.
“Where did you get the diamond?” Do not ask:
but swallow, straight, the spirals of his flask
and assist him at your zipper; pet his lips
and help him clutch you.

Love’s another departure.

Will thexe be any arrivals, confirmations?
Will there be gleaning?

Mary, the Shakedancer’s child

from the rooming-flat, pants carefully, peers at
her laboring lover....
Mary! Mary Ann!
Settle for sandwiches! settle for stocking caps!
for sudden blood, aborted carnival,
the props and niceties of non-loneliness—
the'rhymes qf Leaning.

48
 THE SERMON
ON THE WARPLAND
“The fact that we are black
is our ultimate reality.”
—Ron Karenga

And several strengths from drowsiness campaigned

but spoke in Single Sermon on the yyarpland.

And went about the warpland saying No.

“My people, black and black, revile the River.
Say that the River turns, and turn the River.

Say that our Something in doublepod contains

seeds for the coming hell and health together.
Prepare to meet
(sjsters, brothers) the brash and terrible weather;
the pains;
the bruising; the collapse of bestials, idols.
But then oh then!—the stuffing of the hulls!
the seasoning of the perilously sweet!
the health! the heralding of the clear obscure!

Build now your Church, my brothers, sisters. Build

never with brick nor Corten nor with granite.
Build with lithe love. With love like lion-eyes.
With love like momingrise.
With love like black, our black—
luminously indiscreet;
complete; continuous.”
 THE SECOND SERMON
ON THE WARPLAND

For Walter Bradford

I.

This is the urgency: Live!

and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.

51
 2.

Salve salvage in the spin.

Endorse the splendor splashes;
stylize the flawed utility;
prop a malign or failing light—
but know the whirlwind is our commonwealth.
Not the easy man, who rides above them all,
not the jumbo brigand,
not the pet bird of poets, that sweetest sonnet,
shall straddle the whirlwind.
Nevertheless, live.

52
 3-

All about are the cold places,

all about are the pushmen and jeopardy, theft—.
all about are the stormers and scramblers but
what must our Season be, which starts from Fear?
Live and go out.
Define and
medicate the whirlwind.

53
 4-

The time
cracks, into furious flower. Lifts its face
all unashamed. And sways in wicked grace.
Whose hllf-black hands assemble oranges
is tom-tom hearted
(goes in bearing oranges and boom).
And there are bells for orphans—
and fed and shriek and sheen.
A garbageman is dignified
as any diplomat.
Big Bessie’s feet hurt like nobody’s business,
but she stands—bigly—under the unruly scrutiny, stands in the
wild weed.

In the wild weed

she is a citizen,
and is a moment of highest quality; admirable.

It is lonesome, yes. For we are the last of the loud.

Nevertheless, live.

Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.

54
 About the Author

Gwendolyn Brooks is a native of Chicago and is a

graduate of Englewood High School and Wilson Jun­
ior College. She was cited for creative writing by the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, in 1946, and
received two Guggenheim Fellowships for creative
writing in 1946 and 1947. She has published five vol­
umes of poetry and a novel, and received the Pulitzer
Prize for Poetry in 1950 for Annie Allen, a ballad of
Chicago Negro life.
In I968 Miss Brooks was named Poet Laureate for
the state of Illinois, succeeding the late Carl Sandburg.
She is currently teaching poetry classes at Northeastern
Illinois State College, Columbia College in Chicago,
and Elmhurst College in Elmhurst, Illinois. She is mar­
ried to Henry Blakely and is the mother of two chil­
dren, Henry and Nora.
Format by Peter Mollman
Set in Linotype Janson
Composed, printed and bound by The n t
Harper * Rn«r d V i he Haddon Craftsmen, Inc.
Rper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated