Sterling Allen Brown - Sterling A. Browns a Negro Looks at the South

Sterling A. Brown reading from

his Collected Poems, ca. 1980

Photo credit: Courtesy Roy Lewis Archives

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A Negro Looks at the South by Sterling A. Brown 2007 by John L. Dennis Introduction and notes 2007 by John Edgar Tidwell and Mark A. Sanders

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brown, Sterling Allen, 1901

Sterling A. Browns A Negro looks at the South / edited by John Edgar Tidwell and Mark A. Sanders.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13 978-0-19-531399-4

ISBN 0-19-531399-2

1.African AmericansSouthern StatesSocial life and customs20th century.

2.African AmericansSouthern StatesSocial conditions20th century.3.African AmericansSouthern StatesBiography.4.Oral history.5.Country lifeSouthern StatesHistory20th century.6.Community lifeSouthern StatesHistory20th century.

7.Southern StatesSocial life and customs20th century.8.Southern StatesSocial conditions18651945.9.Southern StatesRace relationsHistory20th century.

I.Tidwell, John Edgar.II.Sanders, Mark A., 1963III.Title.

IV.Title: Negro looks at the South.

E185.86.B698 2006

975'.00496073dc222006012377

The editors dedicate this book to the memory of Daisy Turnbull Brown, Sterling A. Browns beloved wife, Roseanne.

With the publication of A Negro Looks at the South, an important part of Sterling A. Browns aesthetic vision comes to fruition. In his absence, this book has benefited from the contributions and collective goodwill of the following institutions, colleagues, friends, and family.

John L. Dennis, the adopted son of Sterling A. Brown, has understandably been a strong advocate for this project as well as a vigilant guardian of its integrity. We are grateful that he has entrusted us with the task of making this project available to the public.

To Thomas C. Battle, Joellen El Bashir, and the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, we wish to express our gratitude for working so closely with us in bringing this important aspect of Browns writing to completion. In this same spirit, we can only begin to thank Michael S. Harper, who, with perspicacity, encouraged us to investigate Browns papers for this unpublished material; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who saw, in the earliest draft we compiled, the poignancy of Browns extraordinary writing; and Joanne Gabbin, whose germinal scholarship provided the sturdy foundation on which we build.

Adequate financial support is crucial to the completion of any extensive project, especially one that seeks to make disparate parts coalesce into a meaningful whole. We would like to thank the University of Kansas General Research Fund, Glenn Loury and the Institute on Race and Social Division at Boston University, and the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University for their generosity.

Collegial support is also a necessity in a project like this one. For their wonderful words of advice, their time, and their financial and other kinds of assistance, we thank our supporters in the University of Kansas Department of English, particularly the Ad Hoc Committee on African American Literature; the chancellor of the University of Kansas, Robert Hemenway; the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; Victor Bailey who serves KU as director of the Hall Center for the Humanities; and the members of the Department of African American Studies and the Department of English at Emory University.

Thanks are due also to colleagues who wrote letters of recommendation, read drafts of the manuscript, and offered unfailing encouragement in those bleak moments we experienced: William L. Andrews, Lawrence Buell, Rudolph P. Byrd, Deborah L. Dandridge, Elizabeth Davey, Leroy Davis, Frances Smith Foster, Cris Levenduski, Ethelbert Miller, Arnold Rampersad, Steven Saltzman, and John S. Wright. If by chance an error or two have accidentally crept into our work, the fault lies with us and not with their generous assistance.

The physical preparation of a manuscript is never an easy task. We are fortunate that Paula Courtney, Pam LeRow, Gwen Claassen, the late Lynn Porter, Arneta Allen, and Elizabeth Simoneau undertook most of this work for us. Part of this preparation owes to a group of very bright student assistants, who are now scholars in their own right; we gratefully acknowledge the work of Rachel Bateman, Ayana Free, Robert Patterson, Nathan Poell, Vibha Shetiya, Shirley Toland-Dix, Cara Van Nice, Renee Watson, and Andrea Craig Gruenbaum.

Rose Marino, associate university general counsel at Kansas University, was truly unselfish as she provided cogent and timely legal advice, despite her demanding work schedule. For her moral support and her abiding commitment to carrying on Sterling Browns legacy by making his house her own, we thank Marcia Davis. We also wish to extend a warm thanks to Tina Dunkley, director of the Clark Atlanta University Art Galleries, and to Corrine Jennings, director of Kenkeleba House, for their invaluable help in procuring the artwork that graces the cover of this book. And to Shannon McLachlan and Elissa Morris, our editors at Oxford University Press, we offer our sincerest gratitude for their diligence and perseverance in shepherding this project through to completion.

Finally, and most important, we reserve our most heartfelt gratitude for members of our families. We are grateful to Verlean Tidwell, Carmaletta M. Williams, Linda Calvert, and Cornelius Tidwell; Earl and Arthrell Sanders, Claire Sanders and Burton Balfour; Rose Wallace, Raymond Wallace, Christopher and Kimberly Hall Wallace, Gregory Wallace, and Jeff Weiser; and Kimberly Wallace-Sanders and Isaiah Anthony Wallace Sanders for their patience, their understanding, and especially their prayers. They provided so much more than support; they gave us the freedom and luxury of thoughtful reflection in the safe harbors we call home.

John Edgar Tidwell and Mark A. Sanders

In the early 1940s, Sterling A. Brown earnestly began collecting materials that would expand the brief representation of African Americans in the region that Jonathan Daniels impressionistically described in his A Southerner Discovers the South (1938). Brown studiously examined published texts on the matter, and, more important, he personally explored the region with a poets eye, absorbing African American customs, mores, life, language, and lore. As he encountered more and richly diverse experiences, he complained to his wife, Daisy, that there was too much. The Southern landscapes legacy of awesome beauty and its anguished tragedy were aesthetically and emotionally overwhelming. He nevertheless wrote in different expressive modes to capture and present the breadth and depth of the experiences he embraced. The results are preserved in his body of papers and manuscripts collected in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University.