A prophet overheard: a juxtapositional reading of Gwendolyn Brooks's "In the Mecca".

As Gwendolyn Brooks's last collection of poetry to be published by a mainstream press (Harper, 1968), and the first to come out of her conversion to the Black Arts Movement, In the Mecca marks the end of one age for the poet, and the beginning of another. Situated in the cramped confines of a slum tenement on Chicago's South Side, the title poem is local--even narrow--in focus. But the work continues to speak beyond both its particular subject and its point of articulation; indeed, it is in part because "In the Mecca" is such an intense "reportage" (31) that it also functions as a prophecy of "time / crack[ing] into furious flower" ("The Second Sermon on the Warpland," Mecca 54).

Much of the critical debate surrounding Brooks's work has focused on the tension between the particular and the universal, the localized and the transcendent. White critics (feminist and otherwise) have tended to fault her later work, especially, for too narrow a focus and affiliation. The work is not deemed to offer non-Black readers an enticing--or, in Charles Bernstein's terms, "absorptive"--experience. Brooks's attention to the particulars of Black life, it would seem, renders her poetry less accessible to whites and therefore falls short of a "universal" appeal and a "transcendent" value. (1) A number of Black (mostly male) critics, in contrast, heralded Brooks's political shift of the late 1960s as a necessary turn both inward, to her own community, and outward, beyond the confines of the feminine psyche explored in her earlier epic "The Anniad." These critics valued the strong sense of place and position in Brooks's work and saw no merit in striving to appeal to a broader--i.e., white--readership. They charged her earlier poetry, in fact, with too pleading a tone and with a high aestheticism that actually excluded most Black readers. "Universal" and "transcendent" were understandably read as code-words for white appeal. After all, both terms assume a certain relationship to place and space--a geographic, economic, and/or psychic mobility--at odds with the experience of Blacks living in cramped kitchenettes in Jim-Crow Chicago.

Despite what either these latter critics or the 1950 Pulitzer Prize might suggest, however, Brooks never wrote directly or explicitly for a white audience. She was always concerned to represent, to speak to, and to sanctify Black life as she knew it--most especially in the Bronzeville section of Chicago. But clearly, when she adopted the Black Arts credo that "true Black writers speak as blacks, about blacks, and to blacks" (Report 195), she heightened awareness of her social location and political position, rhetorically situating herself and her readers in a new way.

Part of what I, as a white feminist critic, want to argue here is that this newly visible political alignment reduces neither the aesthetic merit of Brooks's later poetry nor its social value beyond the Black community. Indeed, the poet's word remains richly multivalent, in part because she recognizes that the social location from which she speaks is as complex and shifting as it is precise. Although her other rhetoric might seem to favor one line of identification over another (racial rather than gender solidarity, for instance), her poetic practice exemplifies an indissoluble tension and multiplicity. In her poetry, she simultaneously speaks from the margins and centers of both Black culture and the dominant white society, unsettling the opposition between various kinds of insiders and outsiders in the process.

She exhibits, In fact, the very kind of "both/and conceptual orientation" that Patricia Hill Collins identifies as essential to Black feminist thought. Black women have developed this mode of consciousness, Collins argues, to "negotiate [the] contradictions" inherent in "being simultaneously a member of a group and yet standing apart from it" (207). In contrast to standard Western "either/or dichotomous thinking"--an approach that relies on binary oppositions, which inevitably revert to hierarchies--Black feminist thought examines a "matrix of domination ... structured along [multiple]" axes (230). Brooks's poetry speaks from the matrix, and her voice reverberates in both directions along the axes of race, class, and gender.

The first part of this essay will attempt to sketch the matrix, surveying the conditions of Brooks's literary production and reception, in an attempt to establish how a "politics of location" is intrinsic to her spatial poetics. But my rhetorical concerns also extend to the border between the socio-political and the spiritual realms--to ways the poetry exceeds history and geography, speaking beyond its location even as it speaks out of and for it. Through the poet's figuration of space, both excess and absence function not as a strictly spiritual transcendence of time and place, but rather as the reverse image of a necessary liberation. This kind of freedom begins in a particular time and place but potentially extends beyond it. The "ex-static" (2) call for liberation is what I consider the prophetic element of "In the Mecca."

The second half of the essay then offers a "juxtapositional" reading of the prophetic word in Brooks's poem. With this epic, in particular, the poet destabilizes a whole series of sociopolitical dichotomies-- inside/outside, center/margin, here/there, and us/them--in two ways: first, by revealing a complex layering of social, historical, and even geographical forces at play in one seemingly monolithic site (the Mecca building) and, second, by relocating the poem's ultimate "conclusion" beyond the borders of her text. She both maps the matrix and points the way out. Read as an ironic and inverted parable, the poem issues a prophetic call for radical reader-response and responsibility--even across the very lines of race and culture, time and place that Brooks herself delineates so powerfully. All three aspects of the poet's work--the political, the poetic, and the prophetic--are tied to her location, and this is precisely why she continues to speak so powerfully beyond a particular place. Her poetry may not be universal or transcendent in the traditional sense of the words (i.e., timelessly open to identification and appropriation by a privileged white audience), but it continues to speak a liberatory word with implications for both Black and white readers. In contrast to an "integrationist" approach that seeks to salve wounds and consciences, and to reduce tension for the sake of inclusion, a juxtapositional reading aims to expose, even amplify, tensions as a means to transformation. My goal is not to redeem Brooks's more "militant" poetry for a white audience so much, perhaps, as to work out my own redemption as a reader in response to a prophetic word overheard--to formulate an ethical response to a call not meant for me.

Brooks's Social Location as Interpenetrated Space

In the most obvious sense of "location," Gwendolyn Brooks is a Chicago poet. She was Poet Laureate of Illinois for more than three decades, in fact, and the constancy of her geographic identification lends a continuity to her long and varied poetic career. Brooks's parents moved to the South Side of Chicago when she was an infant, and she lived there until her death in 2000, at age eighty-three. For many years, she lived in a series of cramped and damp apartments--basements, garages, and kitchenettes (Report 52)--and struggled to make ends meet with Henry Blakely, whom she married in 1939. As Blacks, they faced both a severe housing crisis in the urban migration "mecca" of Jim-Crow Chicago (3) and a job ceiling that prevented economic advancement. Brooks lived in the same quarter, frequented the same neighborhoods, and described the same streets, for a lifetime, and, from her earliest published collection, her poetry addressed the realities of poor and working-class African Americans in that urban environment.

From the first, the constraining effects of this location on the young poet were countered by the practices of an older generation that had learned how to "make a way out of no way" and a nurturing space out of a confining place. Brooks's parents were the first encouragement to her writing. Her mother had faith that her daughter was to become "the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar" (Report 56), and her father, who dropped out of college to support his family, "revered books and education" (52) and gave his daughter her first writing desk (56). Given the spatial limits of the family home, there was obviously no paternal "library" in which to read and write. The girl's bedroom--small, childish, feminine--thus served as the site of her poetic production for many years. Having written poetry regularly since the age of seven (55), Brooks achieved some degree of recognition early and garnered additional support from the larger Black literary community. As an adolescent, for example, she was mentored by both James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes (173-74). By the time she graduated from high school, she was publishing poems almost weekly in the Chicago Defender and had started an amateur literary magazine (Kent, A Life 25). Remarkably, from an age when most writers are still exploring the most intensely private and purely expressive modes, Brooks was writing with a sense of both a public audience and her place in a larger tradition. It is equally remarkable, perhaps, that for the next half-century her geographic, social, and rhetorical locations never dramatically changed.

So it was also on the South Side of Chicago, in a time of financial crisis but growing racial awareness and solidarity for Brooks, that she received her first formal training as a poet. In 1941, Inez Cunningham--editor of Poetry Magazine and a bold liberal for her day (Report 174)--crossed town from the posh white neighborhood known as the "Gold Coast" to offer a writing workshop in the Negro district of "Bronzeville." The intense scrutiny Brooks encountered in the workshop was the first truly critical response she had received, and it served to spark her poetic impulse. This led to a series of writing prizes and publications in literary magazines, and eventually to a book contract. The enthusiastic response from family, friends, and neighbors was to "thank heaven and Harper's" (72). There was no sense from Brooks's Black supporters that she should be anything but thrilled with her prestigious white publisher. This was the late 1940s, after all, and she was seen as paving new inroads for Black writers--Black women writers especially (Erkkila 192).

The critical response to her first collection of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), was quite positive. The poetry was populist in theme, yet modernist in technique (Gary Smith 129). Black readers appreciated seeing in print the particular urban rhythms and characters they knew so well, while the larger audience of whites enjoyed the opportunity to see into this other world--and both recognized the power of her imagistic verse and balladry. The volume was hailed by the dominant white press as written by an evidently "solidly Chicago person," which nonetheless "would be superb ... in any year by any person of any color" (Engle 3). It was considered fresh "city-folk poetry" ("Review" 5).

There were also patronism and warning discernible in the tone of such reviews, however, as in all those of her early work. Inevitably, it was both notable and negligible that Brooks was a "Negro poet," and while she was widely praised for having "universal" appeal, the category was most often a white construction. She was commended for her strongly focused, or localized, powers of observation, for her direct treatment of things, yet chastised when this focus or location was too far beyond the dominant field of view. A review of Annie Allen (1949), which praises its "Cellini-like lyrics," for example, worries that, when the poetic talent "devotes itself to setting forth an experience even more special and particularized than the usual poetic experience, then it puts itself under unnecessary strain." When the poem deals with colorist discrimination against dark women within the Black community, for example, the critic asks, "Who but another negro can get the intimate feeling, the racially particular ... the oblique bitterness ...?" (Redding 6-7). The poet was expected to "stand in" as a singular representative of her people and mediator to white readers. Exploring differences and exposing divisions within the Black community could only frustrate white expectations of a monolithic racial identity and experience. While racial solidarity is certainly one of the poet's goals from the first; she always both celebrates diversity and recognizes the ways internalized oppression can work to make "outsiders within."

In a review for Poetry, William Stafford alternatingly situates Brooks as a definitive insider and as marginal.

"Sometimes," he claims, "the poems are confusingly local in reference." It would thus seem that being a nonwhite racial "insider" can be disorienting: It distracts the poet from the bearings of the surrounding white culture, and confuses her (white) readers with an obscure locality. On the other hand, Stafford also sets In the Mecca within the context of Brooks's earlier publications by defining these as "books that look in." Gwendolyn Brooks is a "spokesman" for her race, he explains, and she" 'looks in' to a group more avowedly than any of the earlier writers" (Stafford 26). This seems to imply that Brooks somehow stands outside or on the margin of her people, looking in at them, gaining "insight" (26) and then speaking out for them. This rhetoric relies on a geographic schema of containment that puts the poet in her place (as a Negro) even as it accords her some token of privilege and exceptional power of transcendence (as a poet). She is like other Blacks by virtue of her race, and different by virtue of her relation to a white tradition and audience. Stafford's model cannot account for diversity within the racialized "Other." In a similar vein, Norris Clark argues that Brooks exhibits her "dual heritage" as an African American and that, while her unique expression of a Black aesthetic marks her among "black cultural nationalists," she ought not to worry about reaching a large, popular Black audience: "As a spokesperson for the black masses, Brooks is literally different from those for whom she writes; consequently she is the 'seer and sayer,' the Emersonian poet, who articulates the needs, ideas, aspirations of others" (94-95). In this framework, the Black poet speaks for Blacks, but not necessarily to them. Indeed, this description of her people suggests a singularly inarticulate, even illiterate, "mass" trapped inside the limits of their race.

Alternatively, of course, to "look in" from the inside is also to look within the self, to glimpse one's psychic interior with "insight." Indeed, when claiming the universality of Brooks's poetry, her early reviewers tend to argue from the uniqueness of the individual creative mind. The poet speaks as, about, and to all of humanity precisely because she speaks as an utterly free individual. If her race were to serve as more than accident, it would necessarily become a limiting factor, determining her vision and voice as less than transcendent. Blackness, then, would be both an interior space discrete and closed off from the white "universe" and a bodily exterior cloaking a racially unmarked (i.e., white) mind. Brooks's social location might give her a way in to the world she depicts, but her poetic imagination must provide a way out.

Writing four decades later, Sisi Donald Mosby's reflections on the time offer an interesting inversion of this segregated and dualistic spatialization:

   Upon deciding I was a writer I
   devoured the artsy literary review
   magazines. There was very little in
   them about black writers. After reading
   A Street in Bronzeville I understood
   the sense of apartness I felt when I
   read the reviews. I realized I was an
   outsider peeping through the window.

   In A Street in Bronzeville everything
   was in sharp focus. It was about me. I
   lived there, I walked those streets, and
   I knew the people.... It was like being
   born again! (in Madhubuti 23)

In this schema, by contrast, the white literary machine and the dominant culture it represents are an edifice into which Black writers and citizens, as outsiders, can only peer. Although Bronzeville addresses Black life in "kitchenettes" and other enclosed spaces, poems such as "The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith" and the title-poem of the collection itself also locate Black life in the street. Implied is the sense that this world not only borders, but also surrounds and impinges upon, the privileged containment of white life. What Brooks's book does for Mosby is focus his gaze on the exterior space he inhabits--the streets he walks, the other outsiders he knows there--and transform that exterior into a privileged site of self-knowledge and a different kind of "insight." And what his response to this call reveals is that the poet is not merely a spokesperson addressing whites on his behalf, but that she is in an important way speaking to him, to Blacks.

Brooks's relationship to the street and its Black occupants changes, of course, over the course of her career. Initially, her complicated status as insider/outsider to the Black community was shaped by her youthful experience in Chicago's "Black Belt." She was, in her own terms, a "DARK" girl (Report 57) and felt colorist discrimination from other Blacks. She explains that she fell easily into no group, fit nowhere. Her "welcoming, enveloping" (39) home and the writing retreat it provided compensated for the cold reception she sometimes received in her community, but it alone could not alleviate the misfit's sense of restriction. Her autobiography begins with the following revelation, phrased in significantly spatial terms: "When I was a child, it did not occur to me, even once, that the black in which I was encased (I called it brown in those days) would be considered one day, beautiful" (37). Coupled with the protective embrace of her strongly religious mother, this sense of alienation--figured as a kind of bodily enclosure-must have intensified her natural inclination toward isolation.

So while she drew her material from the larger world of Bronzeville--"I wrote about what I saw and heard in the street," she claims (Report 133)--she often did so from a safe window above it. And while poems such as "a song in the front yard" express a secret desire to explore "down the alley, / To where the charity children play" (Selected Poems 6), the poet clearly always relished privacy for writing. From a young age Brooks is both inside and outside the world she portrays, writing "above" it in a literal sense but also both caught and embedded in it. What privileges she has enjoyed--a loving home, an education, extraordinary mentors--remove her from the typical Bronzeville experience even as they enable her to see it with a poetic eye. But Brooks never really "transcends" that space as so many of her white critics suggest, if only because it remains her primary site of identification. It is not until later in her career, however, when she makes that identification more overtly political, that she starts reading and writing poetry with young gang members and earns what Mari Evans has called her "PhD in the street" (84).

Unlike the typical laureate, Brooks's urban vision has always had a certain "bleakness" (Gary Smith 129), and the spaces of her city have most often appeared in her poetry as constraining to Black inhabitants. Indeed, her work has sometimes been considered "naturalistic" for its emphasis on "entrapment and the desire to escape" (130-31). Brooks was certainly sympathetic toward this trait in Richard Wright's fiction, and argued for the necessity of a narrow focus (Report 160). She accepts the view that "some people when oppressed, when walled in, when unable to reach The Enemy, will turn upon themselves" and destroy the seeds of their own future (74). While the poet herself exposes racism and poverty as very real constraints, she refuses to portray the trap as inevitable or ultimate, and so her work is not strictly naturalistic. But escape by individual transcendence (moral, spiritual, or otherwise) is not the alternative outcome Brooks is interested in exploring, either. Rather, from her earliest work, she issues a hopeful call for a communal effort toward resistance and survival--to "civilize a space" for future growth. (4)

Certainly one factor in this cultural optimism is Brooks's sense of her place in and indebtedness to a generally inclusive and nurturing community. Of Hughes, who was a special inspiration to Brooks, she observes, "Mightily did he use the street." Interestingly, she describes his encouragement in spatial terms: "Langston Hughes ... considered literature not his private inch, but great acreage. The plantings of others he not only welcomed but busily enriched.... The young manuscript-bearing applicant never felt himself an intruder ..." (Report 71). Brooks thus admires how Hughes makes of the urban street a vast and peopled garden, and, in her roles as writer, mentor, and teacher, she emulates this throughout her life. Fostering several generations of new Black writers is one of the great accomplishments of her career.

Perhaps because the boundaries of any community are somewhat permeable, Brooks both finds and makes a place for herself at the center of Black cultural life, even as she struggles with being a misfit and outsider at times. Her place in American letters, by contrast, changed dramatically with the publication of Annie Allen (1949), which seemed to cement her "universal" status with the Pulitzer Prize. This collection showed the same focus on Bronzevillean life as her previous book, with even more attention given to the lives of girls and women. It includes, notably, "The Anniad," a mock epic about a girl's coming of age. It also contains poems with a wry critique of white racist indifference, voyeurism, and charity. Its form evinces a more extreme high modernism, however, which drew both appreciation and suspicion from white reviewers and Black readers alike. While those like Redding feared seeing her formal talents "dribble away in the obscure and too oblique" (7), most members of her Black audience may well have been dismayed for opposite reasons, finding the vision of Black life eclipsed by a high formality. Both reactions suggest a dichotomy between content and form (a Black inside and a white outside) that would become more intense during the Black Arts Movement.

Some Black critics also saw the book as obscuring Black life and cutting short Black communication by the direction of its appeal. It was heard, in many ways, as a call to whites. Don L. Lee (later Haki Madhubuti), addresses this conflict in his preface to her 1972 autobiography Report From Part One:

   Annie Allen (1949), important? Yes.
   Read by blacks? No. Annie Allen more
   so than A Street in Bronzeville seems to
   have been written for whites. For
   instance, "The Anniad" requires
   unusual concentrated study ... [and]
   the book has ... a pleading tone....
   there is too much "Grant me that I am
   human, that I hurt, that I can cry." (1718) (5)

Although she would defend her early work, in general as being "political" and full of "rage," (6) Brooks seems to have accepted Lee's critical retrospective on the tone of Annie Allen. Describing the state of Black poetry at that time, she wrote in 1975: "The Forties and Fifties were years of high poet-incense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable" ("Flowers" 1).

The authorization by the white literary establishment that the Pulitzer represented nonetheless gave Brooks a kind of "footing" that Lee acknowledges. The praise from white quarters, which Lee points out "all quarters" encouraged her to accept gratefully--expanded Brooks's cultural access and accessibility across racial lines. It brought both international recognition and a new following among "those 'negro' blacks who didn't believe that one is legitimate unless one is sanctioned by whites first." It also enabled her to get more work writing reviews and such, which was good experience and provided necessary funds (Lee 16-19).

The Bean Eaters (1960), a less extensively experimental book, seemed to amplify the societal critique voiced in Brooks's earlier volumes. White and Black readers and critics considered it more "social," and while the latter may have welcomed this, the former often found it too much so. One reviewer for Poetry, Brooks recalls, chastised her for a "bitter" tone and "revolutionary" tendency (Tate 43). Brooks acknowledges that in those years "it was whites who were reading and listening to us, salving their consciences--our accusations didn't hurt too much. But I was repeatedly called bitter" (Report 176). Even the more positive reviews would be cast in a suspicious light a decade later, with the poet's heightened awareness of the power behind white patronage: "They thought I was lovely," she says. "I was a sort of pet" (177).

So there is this tension in the poet's own appraisal of her early work: On the one hand it was written with a conscious appeal to human goodness and white sympathy, from an integrationist perspective (Report 175); on the other hand, it echoed a pre-conscious identification as, about, and to Blacks (Tate 40). Both the poet's self-positioning and her vision of audience was multiple, inviting variant appropriations and critiques of her work, so that no singular critical evaluation seems to do justice to its rhetorical complexity.

Brooks's fourth major collection of poetry, In the Mecca (1968), is generally considered a transitional work. Indeed, Betsy Erkkila describes the epic title-poem thus: "Begun in the fifties as a novel for juveniles, 'In the Mecca' is a kind of palimpsest that inscribes Brooks's changing and conflicting designs." (7) Erkkila reads the shift as a move "from the female-centered vision of her earlier poems toward the increasingly male-centered vision of her work after 1967" (218). The white feminist critic suggests that Brooks had been moving toward a concept of "female bonding" (219) and "interracial sisterhood" (208) that her identification with Black nationalism short-circuited. While I would question any singular "centering" of Brooks's complexly spatial poetics, there is probably at least some truth to Erkkila's observation. Given that many of the poet's most ardent supporters had, from the first, been Black men--her father, Langston Hughes, and her husband, who sacrificed his own writing career to foster hers (Kent, A Life 53)--it is not surprising that she might have experienced the cultural and social bonds of race as strong lines of identification, and might thus have been resistant to any white feminist efforts to disrupt those ties in the social upheaval of the late 1960s and '70s (Tate 47). (8)

Of course, Black feminist critics like Gloria Hull and Claudia Tare have noted a similar change in gender emphasis, but they have been more sympathetic toward Brooks's goals and strategies. Their main interest is in seeing more of the Bronzeville women in her poetry, rather than in restoring or achieving a feminist-integrationist vision. Not surprisingly, Black male critics represent Brooks's transition--and thus "In the Mecca"--quite differently. Lee and Clark, for examples, both stress the shift from an integrationist to a liberationist or revolutionary vision. To do justice to the interplay of these factors in the construction of place and space of the poem, I do not want to reduce the poem to a simple expression of Brooks's consciousness, or to a single perspective on it, but rather to read it as a shifting space of complex processes, with multiple points of identification.

Analyzing the poem in spatial terms might seem to undermine my concern with social processes and political movement. Indeed, the modern Western philosophical trend has been to oppose both place and space to time. (9) Geographer Doreen Massey outlines this dominant schema in Space, Place, and Gender, explaining that the spatial would be marked by stasis, by the absence of time, and therefore by the impossibility of movement or change. In Foucauldian terms, space signifies "the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile" (149). Place and space, in this framework, are mutually opposed to history and progress, so any local claims, any political action based on a sense of place could only be variations on "reactionary nationalisms." Clearly, this implies a judgment of "the politics of location" as anti-progressive and a historical. (10)

Recent postcolonial, feminist, and postmodern approaches, however, suggest alternative senses of place--of geographic, social, and subjective locations-that are not simply reactionary. Sites of identification, these theories suggest, are both contested and contestatory territory: Even as particular places are fought over, they provide space for critique of other, more apparently stable or central places. Similarly, in the work of Black feminist critics bell hooks and Barbara Smith, "home" (as in "home girl") operates as a figurative space that can accommodate retreat as well as resistance. (11) All such particular locations, hooks and Smith imply, are in some sense multiple.

In approaching a politics of location more explicitly, hooks, Carol Boyce Davies, and others exhibit this double-edged sense of place. In her argument for "choosing the margin as a place of radical openness" (Yearning 145-53), for example, hooks refuses the temporal and geographic closure that would claim to define a place once and for all, and so resists the labels "anti-progressive" and "ahistorical." hooks's work, among others', demonstrates what Michael Keith and Steve Pile assert in Place and the Politics of Identity: A different sense of place is being theorized, no longer passive, no longer fixed, no longer undialectical--because disruptive features interrupt any tendency to see once more open space as the passive receptacle for any social process that cares to fill it--but, still, in a very real sense, about location and locatedness (5). In Massey's terms, this is an "extraverted" sense of place, which means seeing in terms of "open and porous networks of social relations" (121) rather than borders or boundaries. It means acknowledging that "localities can be present in one another, both inside and outside at the same time" (6), and that "the fortunes of individual places cannot be explained by looking only within them." Larger economic relations, for example, play a role in constructing particular social spaces (20). Place, which exists as "a particular articulation" of social relations, thus also "includes relations which stretch beyond--the global as part of what constitutes the local, the outside as part of the inside" (5).

With these theories in mind, I read Brooks's location--geographic, social, and rhetorical--as more complex, fluctuating, and open than her classifications as a "Chicago poet," "Black woman," or "cultural nationalist" might suggest. The multiplicity at play in each of these designations, and the recombinant potential of all three, makes for sites of potentially progressive politicization--of political "movement as well as alignment"(12)--opening the possibility for localized perspectives to function in liberatory ways. An "extraverted" sense of place helps to explain how the Mecca building serves as such a multivalent signifier in Brooks's poem, and suggests why the particular poetic word so powerfully "stretch[es] beyond" the sphere of its articulation.

However much Brooks stays in one place all her career, there is certainly a mid-life shift or turn in her social posture. The event which precipitated this was her attendance at a Black Writers Conference at Fisk University in the spring of 1967. Whereas the by-then renowned poet had been "loved" at the white colleges where she had been speaking, she was only "coldly respected" among the "New Blacks" at Fisk. What she had unwittingly walked into was a hotbed of Black nationalism and a new Black aesthetic, and it was a "blood-boiling surprise" to the fifty-year-old poet (Report 84). A generational divide opened, and she found herself an outsider once more.

Although Brooks was at first amazed and confused by the Black community she met at Fisk, her own experience was ultimately confirmed and validated by their expressions. Messages like "Black is beautiful" (Report 172-73) drew the darker sister "in" in a new way and rang prophetic in her ears. This, and the accompanying "Up against the wall white man!" (85), would necessarily hold a different import for those more clearly "outside," of course. Thus, it is with some amusement that Brooks recalls the self-immolating response of one young white man, who jumped up to shout ecstatically, "Yeah, yeah, kill 'em.... Kill 'em all!" (168). She herself emphasizes the inside/outside distinction of race, but suggests it is a social effect rather than an essential feature: "Your least prerequisite toward understanding of the new black is an exceptional Doctorate which can be conferred only upon those with the proper properties of bitter birth and intrinsic sorrow. I know this is infuriating, especially to those professional Negro-understanders" (85). The poet's goal thus becomes to reach all Blacks everywhere with her call to identification as Black, and to convert those who do not as yet understand the "new Black." But this appeal does not extend across racial lines. Brooks appears to have foregone any hope or sense of responsibility toward a white audience, and was resistant, at least in the seventies, toward a broader "third world" identification (204-05). Group solidarity among Blacks--in Africa and the diaspora--was the first and necessary step toward liberation.

Brooks clearly identifies her own teachers and students as the primary audience to whom she devotes her work in Mecca. The book itself is dedicated "To the memory of Langston Hughes; / and to James Baldwin, LeRoi Jones, / and Mike Alexandroff, / educators extraordinaire" (vi). These Black men--literary, cultural, and social heroes--form the line in which she seeks to follow. It is they, rather than an identifiable set of literary foremothers, who have mentored the poet and provided models of teaching. In her second dedication-of the title-poem--she redirects this line of influence into the future, and in doing so broadens it to include other women writers. The poem is dedicated ("IN TRIBUTE--") to thirteen of her students from the late 1960s (Melhem 162), almost half of whom are female. She may not be interested in recovering and reconstructing lost Black female "influences," (13) but she does seem committed to fostering a more inclusive future.

Brooks's shift toward a Black audience is also exemplified by her move to a Black publisher. In the Mecca was Brooks's last book to come out with Harper, and although she left on amicable terms, her change marked a definite shift in allegiance. The poet claimed in 1967 that she had been able, from the first, to have everything she would want published, but she also recognized that others had not been so fortunate (Report 136), and eventually she saw it as her duty and responsibility to support Black publishing efforts. She moved to Detroit's Broadside Press in 1969 and, later, to Third World Press, based in Chicago. Brooks thus took pains to relocate both the production and the reception of her work within a Black space.

We might expect white critics to be somewhat nonplussed by this move. How does one respond to a work so deliberately directed away from oneself? One strategy would be denial--pretending that nothing had changed--and another, chastisement. In "Gwendolyn Brooks: An Appreciation from the White Suburbs" (1969), Dan Jaffe actually employs both. He praises the recently published Mecca as "a major attempt at synthesis" (58) and emphasizes that "there have been no drastic changes in the tactics and subjects she has dealt with over the years." He also stresses the individuality of her poetic voice, which he rightly observes is multiple, and implies that this is what makes at least some of her poems universal--"some that will undoubtably be read so long as man cares about language and his fellows" (53). Jaffe also assumes a very intimate tone for a critical essay. He frequently refers to the poet as "Gwen Brooks"--something her Black colleagues do only in their personal essays of tribute. (14) He appears to be forcing a certain closeness--between his position in the white suburbs and hers in the Black inner-city--that the poet herself resists.

It is, in fact, the inside/outside dichotomy that presents the problem for Jaffe. "The label 'Black poetry,'" he argues, cannot do justice to her varied abilities, to her breadth. While he accepts the identification "as Black" to some degree, he argues that this must be sacrificed to achieve the universal: "The paradox is that poets are committed to step outside of themselves in order to find the special within themselves" (52). The white critic thus privileges a broad, exterior space, which aligns nicely with the white suburbs from which he speaks, over the constraints of a close, Black, urban perspective. Going beyond, transcending, necessarily means speaking to whites. In what sounds today like a shocking demand on the oppressed to humanize her oppressor, Jaffe asserts that

   ... the real question is not what Gwen
   Brooks has to say to those who have
   shared her experiences, who already
   know some of what she has to say. The
   real question is whether or not she can
   make the alien feel. The purpose of art
   is always to communicate to the uninitiated,
   to make contact across seemingly
   insurmountable barriers. Can the
   poet make the white feel black.... can
   [she] make a comfortable white ... respond?
   (54-55)

Here, the dominant white becomes the "alien," the pitiable outsider, who must be reconciled through the emotional labor of the privileged Black poet. She must build the bridge to justify herself and redeem whites by making them identify with her. This expectation--which women writers of color have so well critiqued in books like This Bridge Called My Back (Moraga and Anzaldua), Black Feminist Thought (Collins), and Changing Our Own Words (Wall) (15)--is precisely the one Brooks rejects in the late sixties. When Tate asks her whether there is "a liability in promoting the practice of segregated literary criticism?" the poet asks in reply, "How are you going to force white critics to learn enough about us? ... whites are going to say what they choose to say about us, whether it's right or wrong, or just say nothing.... We should ignore them" (Tare 45). If transcendence and universality mean appealing to white readers and critics, Brooks rejects these as goals for her work.

Clearly, Brooks's position on this complicates my own project. How can I, a white woman, engage her work and urge others to do so, with the knowledge that the poet is not writing to us, that she is, in some sense, determined to ignore us? I have no easy answer to offer, but I start with the belief that her posture grants me no excuse likewise to ignore her. Indeed, she states that when white critics "just say nothing ... [this] is another very effective way of dealing with us" (Tate 45). The political and ethical implications of calls for segregation have always been very different when issued by Blacks than by whites, after all. One group practices it as a strategy for survival and liberation, the other as a means of domination. Whatever my response to Brooks's work, it is my responsibility; I am accountable for my dealings with the text. I thus seek to negotiate a response different from Jaffe's demand for a personal white address, from the anonymous white man's shout for his own execution, and from Erkkila's lament for the lost vision of women's common oppression. Each of these articulations lacks sufficient awareness of the speaker's own position in relation to the Black-identified woman poet. What else is there, then, besides hegemony, segregation, or silent guilt and martyrdom?

A Juxtapositional Reading of "In the Mecca"

What I propose here is a "juxtapositional" reading of Gwendolyn Brooks's poetry. This means acknowledging that the prophetic voice one hears may not be meant for oneself. Nonetheless, one overhears it from a different but nearby ("juxta") location, and desires to heed its call. One might even draw closer to the site of its utterance, in hope of coming alongside, but not displacing, its original audience. This kind of identification with others--an exstatic extension of the self that comes "next to" (both beside and secondary to) the intended community of reception--may be able to find prophetic meaning for itself in relation. What then, I ask, do I overhear the prophet saying to her people? And how can I and other "outsiders" heed that call alongside them and for us all?

The idea of "juxtaposition" is actually helpful for approaching Brooks's poetry in a number of ways. At the most literal level, a juxtapositional diction and syntax are primary to her poetics. Hortense Spillers explains:

   By displacing the familiar with the
   unfamiliar word, Brooks employs a
   vocabulary that redefines what we
   know already in a way we have not
   known it before. The heightened
   awareness that results brings to our
   consciousness an interpenetration of
   events which lends them a new significance.
  (234; emphasis mine)

Such juxtaposition is evident in "In the Mecca" when, for example, Loam Norton observes: "Anointings were of lice. Blood was the spillage of cups." The only non-Black character in the piece, Norton "considers Belsen and Dachau" when faced with any danger. (16) In a parody of the Twenty-Third Psalm, he juxtaposes modern concentration camps to biblical pastures and "the House of the Lord." Because he does so in response to the tragic disappearance of a little Black girl, this "redefines" both sites of suffering (the death-camp and the urban slum) as well as the religious pastoral ideal (17) and faith in divine rescue.

The way in which positive and negative images are "yoked and coordinated" (Kent, "Poetry" 78) here is an expression of what Theophus Smith identifies as a distinctly Black aesthetic and cultural practice. (18) In this example, the immediate realities provide the more powerful images (lice and blood), tarnishing the traditional spiritual ones (anointings, overflowing cups), rather than being sacramentalized by them. "... jungles or pasture" and "the house of the Lord" therefore become suspect as sites of refuge for either persecuted Jews or poor Black children, whose "gaunt / souls were not restored, their souls were banished" (16).

Clark concludes that such descriptive passages--"devoid of racial polemic or black rhetoric" (87) but nonetheless gut-wrenching--are the most vivid examples of a genuinely Black aesthetic. He explains that Brooks "does not tell us that there is evil.... rather, she shows us ... that we may learn a moral insight from the juxtaposition." Further, he argues that "the true aesthetic significance, thematically, is that the black lives [in the Mecca] ... are meaningful and reflect an 'ultimate reality' in formal juxtaposition to expectations" (89). Black life itself, by its very existence in America, is lodged against dominant visions of reality and poses alongside them (or juxtaposes) an alternative view. In the city, these contrasts are all the more notable for being crammed into a limited space. The oddities of Brooks's diction, then, reflect the frictions of urban living, (19) and the poet's representation of the space of inner-city Black life implies an "interpenetration" of events or processes which lends places both "inside" and "outside" a new significance.

In terms of the actual places juxtaposed in her work, Brooks ranges broadly. Most notably, though, she imports the image and idea of Africa to signify on the experience of Blacks in America. Brooks's post-1967 identification with Africa was a kind of journey home for the woman who had, as a second-class citizen, struggled to be "at home" in America, yet it was no idyllic haven. In her descriptions of her travels to the continent, she emphasizes the great gulf between the two places and her own inability to bridge it. In fact, the poet finds her most powerful tool to be one of the clearest markers of the irrevocability of the loss (Report 88). English itself becomes, for her, both a space of exploration and a place of confinement. When Africa then appears as a home to which she can never return, (20) the poet turns to the construction of "Afrika" as a sphere of memory and imagination, a sacred space with the potential to sacralize Black life in the diaspora of the modern social "whirlwind." She does this by envisioning Afrika as a shared and shifting space of identity. In her later poem "To the Diaspora," she writes,

   When you set out for Afrika
   you did not know you were going.
   Because
   you did not know you were Afrika.
   You did not know the Black continent
   that had to be reached
   was you. (To Disembark 41)

Erkkila reads this, along with Brooks's claim to be "essentially an essential African" (Report 1), as a "celebration of the sameness and universality of black nature across personal, historical, and national bounds" that effaces the very particularity and multiplicity that had always funded her poetic vision (Erkkila 224). "Nature" is not the only way to talk about identity, nationhood, and racial consciousness, however, and the unique and different are still prominent in Brooks's poetry. Indeed, her use of "the Black continent" is an imaginative and political construct meant to produce certain effects--pride, solidarity, survival, and liberation--in the midst of overwhelming opposition. Because the site of ultimate reference is not literal, it avoids a reactionary naturalization and dehistoricization of place. Indeed, Brooks's project is profoundly concerned with history and its irrevocability. Writing as an Afrikan, or as Black, Brooks relocates herself with a politicized identity that exceeds this (or any) place. She resists the role of victim to racist social forces not by a transcendent escape of history and geography, but by insisting upon a liberatory deconstruction of the site of oppression itself. Her goal is a radical reconstruction from within.

With "In the Mecca," Brooks uses Africa to sacramentalize Black struggle in the United States by a kind of "interpenetration" or superimposition, importing its image to Chicago's South Side. The result is a powerfully ironic juxtaposition of places. The towering Mecca building signals the Saudi holy city of Islam: the center to which Malcolm X had made his pilgrimage in 1964. (21) Built as a monument to modern American progress, the complex would seem to claim a mystical and holy power, issuing from elsewhere, to reward, guide, soothe, and subdue its inhabitants. At the same time, by taking its name from Africa, the new-world construct seeks to absorb and nullify the other world's mythic power, along with its people. Making claims to other places can be a colonizing move, rather than a liberating one, depending on the agent and motives.

The actual Mecca building is a palimpsest, marking the processes of American history. It was built as a modern apartment building in 1891, "a splendid palace, a showplace of Chicago...."(22) R. Baxter Miller takes this date to be significant because "it designates a post-Darwinian world. In American history, industrialization had ended the dream of an agrarian world," and urban progress and technology were replacing communal and spiritual ideals (147). But by 1912, whites had abandoned the South Side of Chicago to the Black Belt, and the Mecca building had become a residence for "the black elite" (Melhem 165). Its name thus stands for Chicago itself as a Black urban "mecca." The building's decline was precipitated during the Great Depression, and it rapidly deteriorated to a slum. At this point, the ironic progression of its name is completed: from ancient spiritual home, to modern urban palace and symbol of material progress, to the pathetic endpoint of Black urban migration. Lerone Bennett, Jr., describes this last reality as "Black boys and girls who came North looking for the Promised Land and found concrete deserts" (Madhubuti 14).

In 1941, the Mecca location was purchased by the Illinois Institute of Technology, which was housed (in juxtaposition) across the street. This other building, designed by Mies Van der Rohe, stood as a monument not only to modern technology, but also to modern art. The plan was for the technical school to tear down the Mecca slum and expand its own magnificent facilities onto that site (Melhem, "Mecca" 166). ITT's campaign to have the building condemned and demolished as a "fire-trap" came with no real offer of "escape," however. The threat of forceful eviction--to "be placed" somewhere(23)-is no rescue from the slum.

It is significant, then, that the body of Brooks's poem begins with these lines: "Sit where the light corrupts your face. / Mies Van der Rohe retires from grace. / And the fair fables fall" (5). Melhem summarizes the import of these lines as "the failure of religion, art, and politics in confronting American life." White, Western fables of triumph or redemption have not extended to the Black urban slum. Modern art, in particular, is powerless to save the Mecca: "indeed," Melhem concludes, "modern art turns away" (167) while state institutions bulldoze and appropriate the spaces of Black life and history for their own advancement. As an abandoned project of modernity, the Mecca stood as a crumbling tower of Babel--a failed attempt at transcendence. As Mecca, it marked the ruin of faith in postmodern times. It stood as a blight, corrupting the view and preventing the expansion of the state's technological enterprises. After a decade of protest and threatened riots, the Mecca building was finally razed in 1952.

The slum tenement resurrected in Brooks's poem raises questions of faith and politics through yet more specific invocations of Africa. The first is in the querying imagination of the frustrated poet Alfred. He reads "Joyce / or James or Horace, Huxley, Hemingway" and "thinks, or drinks until the Everything / is vaguely part of One thing and the One thing / delightfully anonymous / and undiscoverable" (7). Steeped in white Western tradition, he has learned to look for a unifying and universal principle--something vague and anonymous, surely something disconnected from the "smear" of poverty he faces daily. This is not his only source of knowledge, though. He questions:

   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?
   what was their joining thing? (7-8)

This question raises two issues: imposing external white, Western frames (monotheism or monolithism) on other cultures (Alfred can only read Africa through Emersonian eyes); and the resistance strategy of finding or forging a "joining thing" (such as Blackness) as a means of coming together in the face of racism, isolation, and poverty. Alfred also recalls Africa more specifically in his identification with Leopold Senghor, the poet elected first president of independent Senegal in 1960. Alfred, the would-be poet, "can speak superbly of the line of Leopold." Senghor stands for him as a symbol of both a Black aesthetic--he "Believes in beauty. / But believes that blackness is among the fit filters"--and a politics of location--he "listens / to the rich pound in and beneath the black feet of Africa." This other place to which Alfred aspires exists as power, potential, and openness, as opposed to the over-wrought spaces of Europe and America. Senghor, he imagines, is "rootless and lonely" in Europe and rejects Western standards of beauty and construction: "gargantuan gardens careful in the sun, / fairy story gold, thrones, feasts, the three princesses, / summer sailboats / like cartoon ghosts or Klansmen, pointing up / white questions, in blue air.... / No." The African does not surround himself with protective, opulent, and sinister materials; instead, he "loves sun" (20-21).

And "sun" is precisely what is missing from the Mecca building. Alfred's perception of place and space is especially acute. Just as he, too, "might have been a poet-king" (20), envisioning and shaping a new nation, so he also "might have been an architect" (19). He "can speak of Mecca" in poetic terms, showing real insight into its architecture. He describes the U-shaped structure: "firm arms surround / disorders, bruising ruses and small hells, / small semi-heavens: hug barbarous rhetoric / built of buzz, coma and petite pell-mells." Individual apartments are "small hells" or "small semi-heavens" squeezed together by the firmness of the overall structure (20). The dirt courtyard, littered with trash and broken glass, (24) is the central site of noise, violence, and confusion. Trapped in the arms of this building, this small world, Alfred imagines Africa as an alternative source of poetry and politics. His vision is ultimately powerless to transform the Mecca, however, since for all his insight, "Alfred has not seen Pepita Smith" (19). He has not yet found a way to connect "the line of Leopold" with the lives of Blacks lost in America.

"Don Lee," the only historical figure residing in the Mecca, suggests the possibility of such a connection. Unlike Alfred, he has deliberately extricated himself from white philosophical influences, and his Black nationalist message "stands out in the auspices of fire / and rock and jungle-flail" (21). Whereas Alfred can only speak of what he sees and knows, Don Lee "wants." His desire, his demands, are clear, and they make him a charismatic leader. The nation he imagines and proposes is a wholly new construction--"a new nation / under nothing"--and he wants for it "new art and anthem; will / want a new music screaming in the sun" (22). So the sun appears in his vision of the Black nation, also, but with more violent imagery.

In addition to Pepita, other Meccan figures are lost to varying degrees, and Lee would be the one to call them out into the sun, if they could hear him. Hyena, the "striking debutante" or prostitute (Greasley 14), is lost in a white-identified aesthetic and internalized racism. "A fancier of firsts," she is "One of the first, and to the tune of hate, / in all of the Mecca to paint her hair sun-gold" (6). The sun--emblem of Africa elsewhere--ironically images Hyena's bleached-blonde hair, symbol of black self-hate. Philip Greasley argues that since Hyena's name refers to one of the "ignoble African animals," she serves a deromanticizing function in the poem (14). But Hyena does not know she is Afrika. When she leaves the Mecca, oiled and perfumed, she is "off to the Ball"--a euphemism laden with white fantasy. Her imagination does not stretch far, and it does not enable her to see or value Pepita: "'a puny and a putrid little child'" (21). (25)

Just as Hyena's hopes are pinned on "the Ball," so a multitude of characters in the building seeks identification with alternative spaces: St. Julia has prayer pastures (5), Melodie Mary compares her home to China (9), Loam Norton recalls Belsen and Dachau (15), Great Gram recalls the slave cabin, and Mrs. Sallie imagines trading places with the white mother in whose home she labors (15). Each struggles to remember or envision an alternative space, but none ultimately succeeds in escaping or transcending the tragedy of the Mecca (16). We see them, finally, in its dim doorways and hallways. Even Pepita, who liked to play in the "fly-open door" of the A & P, and who might have gone to kindergarten, is confined in death to lie "in the dust with roaches" under Jamaican Edward's cot (31).

But it is Alfred and Don Lee, in particular, whose external identifications serve the struggle to speak from the Mecca "as Blacks." In order to damn the architecture that constrains them, they must expose the reality of the Mecca as a ruin, but they--or the poet--must also question its inevitability. Simultaneously to portray the construct as a prison or trap and also to suggest the possibility of dismantling it from the inside, is the challenge. The Meccans, all, must be shown as constrained but not dehumanized, oppressed but not obliterated, or the call for their liberation would be hopeless and meaningless. Don Lee is an image of Black power. Alfred shows potential for growth. That some others have fashioned "small semiheavens" in the midst of infernal architecture is a sign of hope.

But if the name "Mecca" symbolizes an African-identified paradise, then the poem is an ironically inverted parable about the nature of such a place--perhaps a negative imprint of it--rather than a map for how to reach it. And if the poet invites readers on a pilgrimage, she does so only obliquely. Instead of identifying the road or way to Mecca, the poet begins, "Now the way of the Mecca was on this wise" (4; emphasis mine). D. H. Melhem identifies this as a parabolic introduction with a biblical tone (167), and, indeed, it does echo the gospel pattern "the Kingdom of Heaven is like...." The images of "black unity and harmony," that Greasley explains are Brooks's attempt to "provide positive imaging by which blacks can move toward" self and communal liberation (15), are largely missing from this poem. There is little here to fund an image of either "the Kingdom" or "the spirit of the united black community to come." (26) The prophetic tone is thus primarily critical, rather than visionary, although the critique itself can be taken as an inside-out kind of vision.

The poem is mythical and biblical not only in its style but also in its sources. It draws together remnants of Dante's descent into hell, the pastoral ideal of the twenty-third psalm and the American-Johnny-Appleseed-Dream, and the parables of the lost coin and sheep for examples, to fashion a loosely narrative quest. A little girl has gone missing, and the entire massive project must be searched to find her. Apartment by apartment, floor by floor, the Mecca is combed, and its inhabitants questioned. What emerges in the poem is not only the loss and containment of the little girl--who has been murdered and stuffed under a bed--but the multitudinous losses that comprise the lives of those who are trapped in the building. The Mecca, despite its expansiveness, provides little space for the exercise of freedom, and so is experienced primarily as a place of confinement. The walls of the building itself might be seen as constructed from the cramped lives and constricted voices of its inhabitants. They have become immobile bricks in their own prison-house.

The construction of Brooks's poem mirrors the monumental architecture of its setting. "In the Mecca" appears on the page in thick, long columns of irregular verse. Individual characters and their unique "places" are crowded in. Juxtaposed, they jostle against each other and press out against a jagged margin. This jumble of voices and places is punctuated with stark expressions that struggle to emerge from the depth of confusion--the most notable being Mrs. Sallie's cry in the Black vernacular, "WHERE PEPITA BE?" Offset by uppercase letters, this singular and panicked call is soon resubmerged in crowded multiplicity:

   ... Cap, where Pepita? Casey, where
      Pepita?
   Emmett and Melodie Mary, where
      Pepita?
   Briggs, Tennessee, Yvonne, and
      Thomas Earl,
   where may our Pepita be? (13)

The mother thus questions her older children by name, striving to preserve each one's unique place. But they reply in an anonymous chant of ignorance: "Ain seen er I ain seen er I ain seen er/ Ain seen er I ain seen er I ain seen er" (14). The plosive sounds of the girl's lame and BEing are diffused into dull anonymity and absence. Word slides into word, voice blends into voice, face blurs into face in the Mecca's cramped quarters, against a mother's cry and vision that insist on the particularity of a singular loss.

Like her initial recognition--"SUDDENLY, COUNTING NOSES, MRS. SALLIE / SEES NO PEPITA. 'WHERE PEPITA BE?' "--the mother's question to her neighbors comes in a longer line, standing out slightly but insistently from the cluttered stanzas: "One of my children is missing. One of my children is gone" (15). Each neighbor then replies, in ignorance of Pepita's whereabouts, with his or her own story of space, place, and loss.

Against inhuman pressures from without, characters strive to construct points of connection or shrines of meaning in their ever-narrowing spaces. What they reject or cling to may not appear sensical to those outside the Mecca building or poem, but it is part of a larger survival strategy. Melodie Mary's mind, for instance, cannot encompass any grief too large. Her world is too small and too full of pain already. So, for Pepita's older sister,

   headlines are secondary.
   It is interesting that in China
   the children blanch and scream,
   and that blood runs like a ragged wound
   through the flesh of the land.
   It matters mildly....

But, she wonders, "Where are the frantic bulletins / when other importances die?" and she identifies with something smaller and closer to her own compact existence:

   Trapped in his privacy of pain
   the worried rat expires,
   and smashed in the grind of a rapid heel
   last night's roaches lie.

The young girl "likes roaches, / and pities the gray rat" (10), substitute images for her missing sister.

She shares something of her brother Brigg's need for self-containment. In the vice-grip of external pressures, he determines to maintain his own rigid boundaries. He selects an armor more rigid than the roach's, though: "Briggs is adult as a stone / (who if he cries cries alone)." This fossilized existence protects him from loss, but it also precludes the sense of growth, hope, empathy, or community that might breed change. Thus, when he must go out among the gangs, "across the intemperate range," he perceives that "Gang / is health and mange. / Gang / is a bunch of ones and a singlicity." For a boy for whom "Immunity is forfeit, love / is luggage, hope is heresy," and the risk of annihilation mounts daily, the violent price of joining a gang seems reasonable. The poet urges her readers to feel the pain of this dilemma--"Please pity Briggs" (11)--but cautions against objectifying the Meccans as wholly "other" and thus further solidifying the walls of their containment. "... there is a central height in pity," she writes, highlighting the self-elevation that would disguise itself as depth, "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,
   not with Us. (11)

With this line, the poem invites its readers in--to see its inhabitants as "Us," and to struggle alongside, in the dim and cramped quarters, to make meaning and to search for points of outlet and transformation in the Mecca walls.

Of course, any attempts by "outsiders" to make sense and safety out of such a site of oppression risk ethical compromise. When whites finally do arrive to track down Pepita--in the form of "The Law" with a "lariat of questions (18-19)--they do so primarily to contain black crime within the color line and to pronounce sentence upon it. They show no interest in the distraught black mother or show an ability to follow her lead. Their form of rescue merely effects another trespass.

As Brooks's determination to write "to Blacks" suggests, there is no easy entrance here for the white reader. Resolved to ignore her white readers, he leaves us to knock at the door. In Charles Bernstein's terms, I am frequently caught between the absorptive pull (imaginatively identifying as an insider) and the opposing push (against white--and white feminist--incursion). In recognizing the latter force as a necessary resistance from those more thoroughly "inside," I can neither oppose it nor harness it for myself. I can only enter a necessary dance, in and out of the push-and-pull, to remain engaged, to keep moving, and to keep pressing toward the kind of action the poem might be calling for. It is my contention that readers with racial privilege need not simply turn away in grief from the prophet's hard word, like the rich young man in the gospel story. But if our entrance into discipleship begins with an act of identification, it ultimately requires, like camels through the eyes of needles, a more radical transformation of spatial relations than can be achieved by mere good will. (27)

Brooks's poem is thus much more than a depiction of a particular place. With "In the Mecca," she begins to issue a call for liberation, represented as a communal construction out of that ruined space. Rooted in the particularities of poor Black Meccans, this liberation appears only in negative representation, or in the "negative space" cut by the Mecca's architecture. Freedom, in this case, is what is excluded or crowded out of the urban tenement. It figures in this palace-come-prison as absence, excess, and loss. Because it is viewed as a crumbling ruin, the Mecca building is seen to "open" to other possibilities. When the Mecca finally ruptures, what crosses its prison-like threshold is the transgressed and murdered body of a little girl. It is, then, her victimization that ultimately signals the necessity of freedom, her loss that points to the meaning of her life, and her silence that signals the necessity of speech and of poetry.

Brooks's poem concludes with the discovery of Pepita's body in Jamaican Edward's apartment. That he, St. Peter-like, "denies and thrice denies a dealing / of any dimension" with her confirms that this act of violence upon another Meccan is not only a crime but also a betrayal--of communal, political, and spiritual proportions. What exactly Edward has done to his little neighbor is not clear, but there are ample clues to suggest sexual violation, thus complicating any easy identification of the Mecca, or of a male-identified cultural nationalism, as a singularly "safe space."

After death, Pepita is to be carried out and away from the Mecca. Her departure is a tragic, anti-transcendent escape of the constraints of racism and poverty; the budding poet (whose name means 'little seed') will, after all, never bloom, but neither will she learn "that black is not beloved." Nor will she grow into the apathy of adults like Queenie King who "little care, Pepita, what befalls a / nullified saint or forfeiture / a child" (27).

Reading a transcendent sense of "rapture" (as ecstasy, spiritual transport, or apocalyptic rescue) into Pepita's departure from the Mecca is severely complicated by the reality of rapture as sexual conquest. Rape is prevalent in the poem itself, and it is primarily Black female bodies that are in real danger of objectification and exploitation. If, as Betsy Erkkila summarizes, the Black woman appears in African American women's literature as "the site of social rupture, the place where the contradictions of American culture are located and exposed" (199), then we must read the transgression of Pepita's body as double: She is ruptured, broken, and violated, and she is also raptured, removed, and carried across the Mecca's borders. She is a ruptured site, and her rapture ruptures the communal site. The hole she leaves behind is also a hole in the Mecca's architecture--the first brick removed from the prison walls. Her loss is thus both a radical dismemberment of the Meccan "community" and the sign of a needed re-membering and re-imagining of a more powerfully self-identified Black community.

Alfred, another poet, finally begins to hear his prophetic calling only with the uncovering of Pepita's body:

   I hate it.
   Yet, murmurs Alfred--
   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 the 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. (31)

What Alfred sensed before only as a "rending" (27), he perceives now as a potential space for transformation. The collapse and construction that he envisions depend upon his ability to bear witness to what is substanceless--to Pepita's death and absence. The prophet's task, like the poet's, is a sane "reportage" of what exceeds articulation. In a reversal of traditionally gendered roles, then, Alfred finally becomes a bit of fertile ground for the sowing and growth of Pepita's seed. Without this possibility, the meaning of her name is wholly ironic: Pepita would fall only as the parabolic seed upon rock or among thorns, a tragic remainder in a concrete desert.

But Alfred, leaning toward another Meccan voice for the first time, figures a hopeful future growth. This hope emerges more clearly in the poems which follow the epic, in the volume's "After Mecca" section. In "Sermon on the Warpland," for example, the poet preaches: "Say that our Something in doublepod contains / seeds for the coming hell and health together" (49). Brooks never separates her vision of health from her social critique, or call for justice. She asserts that healing for some will surely mean "hell" for others--the ultimate juxtaposition. In this way, "in the Mecca" reads as a parable of inversion: one in which the coming "kingdom" is signaled by a reversal of social status. (28)

Brooks's message was in fact heard as a prophetic call by those "inside" her community of racial "outsiders." In her aptly titled poem "Our MZ Brooks: Clearing Space at the LOC," Eleanor Traylor represents the response to "In the Mecca" from those within the movement:

   Querying her glance calls loudly, yet
      unperturbed,
   "Pepita, Pepita, where is Pepita?
   "Pepita, Pepita, where is Pepita?
   "Pepita, Pepita, where is Pepita?"
   ... Answers "hoodo holler" through
   the white washed room
   gathering like some gentle
   cloud
   raining on the memory
   of our dreams:
   Pepita here! Pepita here! Pepita, here is
      Pepita!
   Pepita here! Pepita here! Pepita, hear
      Pepita.
   We are all, Pepita, here. (59-60)

Brooks's young Black audience--women and men alike--are identified with and as Pepita, drawing together and re-membering the dispersed Black family under their mother-prophet's wing.

How other readers experience this calling and coming "Something," this apocalyptic birth-in-death, surely depends on how we relate to the Mecca as an historical, mythical, and social space, and how our reading of the poem receives the "seedpod" of the prophet's word. The meaning of a parable resides, after all, in its reception.

We should note, of course, that Brooks resists the title "prophet." George Stavros, in a 1969 interview with the poet, calls her series of "Sermon[s] on the Warpland" (in Mecca and Riot) "apocalyptic and prophetic," to which Brooks replies, "They're little addresses to black people, that's all," and changes the subject (Report 152). Stavros pushes her again, asking if she doesn't speak in "the voice of the prophet, speaker to the people ...?" and Brooks responds, "I don't want to be 'a prophet.' ... I am not writing poems with the idea that they are to become 'social forces.' ... I don't care to proceed from that intention" (153). Nonetheless, Brooks began writing in the late sixties with a new awareness that, if "shrieking into the steady and organized deafness of the white ear was frivolous," there were, in contrast, "things to be said to black brothers and sisters, and these things, annunciatory, curative, inspiriting, were to be said forthwith, without frill and without fear of white presence" ("Flowers" 1). This is how she characterizes Black poetry of that time in general, resisting any of the special status that "prophet" might imply.

If the prophetic is understood as a social construction--a category of speech determined by those "inside" a community which is "outside" the dominant order, a speech coming out of the inner being ("exousia"), a speech which nonetheless takes one beyond the borders of the self, in radical, "exstatic" identification with the Other (e.g., Black brothers or Africans)--then Gwendolyn Brooks's poetry is prophetic. (29) Reading between the lines of her own denial, after all, we can conclude that she does not reject this role altogether; she merely resists claiming it as her intention or goal. What true prophet, after all, desires to be a prophet? Isn't resistance to the title necessary to deserving it?

Taken as a prophetic text, "In the Mecca" requires a double-edged reading that attends to difference as well as similarity, anti-absorption as well as absorption, and criticism as well as affirmation. If white feminist critics are to enter the text in imaginative identification with Black women, for example, we must recognize the Mecca's marginal location not only as a site of shared pain, but also as a "space of refusal" (hooks 150) that resists the class and race privileges we would unwittingly bring with us. As parable, the poem may speak secrets we as "outsiders" are yet unable to hear. It also necessarily remains open and unfinished--anticipating a liberation fulfilled only in the actual response of its hearers/readers "outside" or "beyond" the textual realm.

Gwendolyn Brooks's work resists any simple "integration." Her work is based instead on a model of juxtaposition that highlights the need for liberation, and the potential necessity for radical reversals. She exposes the dangers of colonizing another's place and the strategic need for segregated spaces. She depicts ruined enclosures as prisons whose remaking from within has yet to begin.

Brooks's epic poem does have a transcendent aspect in that it draws meaning and power from another location--a realm beyond the text and beyond its own socio-historical time and place. The representation of this space, however, emerges primarily in its negative image. Brooks's poem clearly demonstrates how the absence of freedom, community, and divine presence can be felt and figured as a radical call for their historical construction.

Whereas womanist theologian Katie Cannon characterizes Black women's literature as a "living space carved out of the intricate web of racism, sexism, and poverty" (7), I read "In the Mecca" as an exposition of deathly places--ruin, prison, tomb, hell--with a concomitant challenge to reclaim and transform them from with in. This carries redemptive potential. As Miller argues, in Brooks's epic, "revealing the paradox of the American Dream suffices, for to show one's reader paradise is not the only way to save his soul" (158). (30) For those of us reading juxtapositionally, it remains up to us to "work out our own salvation" in response to Brooks's parable of infernal architecture. And to do so means recognizing not only that we are equally embedded in the "matrix of domination," but also that a shift in posture is possible. Indeed, we might need to undergo some radical "dislocation" to squeeze through the eye of the needle.

Two Poems for Gwendolyn Brooks

A Prophet Imagined

   I want to say that you are an angel
   and from you, Jacob-like, I'll wrestle
   a blessing in the dark

   or I'd say you were a master
   from whose table I'd beg crumbs
   like a dog, like a gentile woman

      won't you cast out the unclean
        spirits
      from my children?

      but then I'd have my lines crossed
   wouldn't I?
   my history inside-out

   for white has been so long so loved
   and black, a belated chosenness

A Prophet Overheard

   you were not calling me but
   I heard you calling

   calling the sisters,
   brothers, children
   in your house, in Chicago,
   in Afrika

   the house was burning and
   you were calling them
      OUT
   calling out to them
   but I heard you from
   over here
   in my back yard

   I wanted to run down the alley crying
   but it was your alley and
   your fire and your voice and

   so I stood at the gate and whispered
   yes
   yes

   I say amen
   to your No
   the flames licked my face
   a love, angry
   and not meant for me

   some hear your voice as a brook
   bubbling, a river
   turning, a sister
   singing

   but it singes me
   a hot call
   guiding, gilding, still

--Sheila Hassell Hughes

Notes

(1.) in a particularly interesting reinterpretation of these terms, George Kent defends the "legitimate univerealism" of Brooks's work: "Her poems tend not to represent a reach for some preexisting Western universal to be arrived at by reducing the tensions inherent in the Black experience," he explains. Rather, "their univerealism derives ... from complete projection of a situation of experience's space and vibrations (going down deep, not transcending)" ('Poetry" 73-74).

(2.) I employ this term to identify the locational aspect of the ecstatic speech here: The poet speaks out of (ex) her own station and status, and in so doing exceeds the stasis of utter confinement.

(3.) Kent summarizes how the mess migration of blacks to Chicago during the Depression and Second World War (totaling 100,000) was condensed into an area that expanded by only one square mile (A Life 52).

(4.) This phrase appears in the sonnet "First Fight, then Fiddle," in Annie Allen (Selected Poems 54).

(5.) Brooks herself has also judged Annie Allen as a studious collection in the years following her 1967 political and aesthetic "conversion." "The Anniad" she labels as "an exercise, just an exercise" (in Hull and Gallagher 32). Of course, I see no need to reduce the significance of the poem to the poet's own intent or appraisal. It is important to note, for instance, that black women critics have valued the work for the way it, more than any other, gives sustained attention to black female experience (Hull and Gallagher; Tate; Guy-Sheftall).

(6.) In an interview with Claudia Tate, Brooks upbraids the interviewer for not using the word political in a broad enough sense, and says, "I'm fighting for myself a little bit here because I believe it takes a little patience to sit down and find out that in 19451 was saying what many of the young folks said in the sixties.... The poets of the sixties were direct. There's no doubt about it ... [but] my works express rage and focus on rage" (Tate 42-43).

(7.) See Melhem's (161) and Miller's (146) essays on the poem for more detailed explanations of the work's evolution over a decade.

(8.) If her racial politics are radical or separatist, rather than integrationist, her gender politics are the opposite. Like many womanists, Brooks, acting from a concern for community cohesion in the face of overwhelming pressures from the "outside," would reject white feminist liberationist ideals. She explains to Tate: "There's a lot going on in this men-woman thing that bothers me ... but these are family matters. They must be worked out within the family. At no time must we allow whites, males or females, to convince us that we should spill I know there's a lot of splitting going on now.... It's another divisive tactic dragging us from each other, and it's going to lead to a lot mere racial grief. The women are not going to be winners on account of leaving their black men and going to white men, to themselves, or to nobody" (47). The image of "dragging us from each other" is a powerful one, given the legacy of slaves forcibly separated from their natural families (in Africa and in the United States).

(9.) Borrowing from psychoanalytic and semiotic theories, I take "place" to refer to one's location, situatedness, or the position from which one perceives and speaks to others. One's place, in this sense, determines and is determined by a relation to others that is often oppositional. In relation to place, "space" signals something mere fluid. Space implies freedom of movement, or expansiveness. If place is the point, space is the continuum. In this schema, place signals the particular and immanent, and space the universal and transcendent. The former is not simply contained within the latter, however, for the border is permeable and inside and outside can shift. Space can also imply something that is created in, or hollowed out of, some place or mass.

(10.) D. Harvey, The Conditions of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), summarized in Massey 139-40.

(11.) hooks remembers the historical role of African American women in creating "homeplaces"--sites of resistance and healing--for family and community, hooks stresses her appreciation of this as a chosen, rather than essential, role. Barbara Smith discusses her choice of a title in the introduction to Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. "Home girls" refers to girls from "the neighborhood" (a term that encompasses and connects multiple literal black neighborhoods in the U.S.), but it also articulates the need for a home, a "place to be ourselves," to be at home with each other and escape the role of the social outsider. Smith outlines a number of ways that "home" is complicated for black women: the ambivalent role of women in the family, and also the broader black community, in transmitting "fear and shame ... as well as hope" (xxii); the problem of conformity within a group pressed to define itself in opposition to oppression (xxxix); the "psychic violence" of incorporating that oppression as self-hatred; and the need for a concept of the "simultaneity of oppression" for "coalition building" across different social locations.

(12.) I borrow these terms from Diana Fuss's introduction to Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, in which she maps the space of "the closet."

(13.) When Hull presses Brooks about the absence of heroic female figures in her poetry from the sixties and seventies, Brooks explains, "These people who influenced me so much in the late sixties tended to be men.... The women--what can I say about them? ... Well what were the women doing ... aside from amening what the others did.... I didn't say 'Okay, women are supposed to take the back seat and I won't write about them.' ... there was this tendency on the part of the women--announced too--to lift the men up, to heroize them" (Hull and Gallagher 36-37).

(14.) Two tribute anthologies have been published: To Gwen With Love, ed. Brown, et al. (1971); and Say That the River Turns: The Impact of Gwendolyn Brooks, ed. Madhubuti (1987).

(15.) In Wall, for example, Valerie Smith describes the appropriation of black woman's intellectual labors: "Black women are employed, if not sacrificed, to humanize their white superordinates, to teach them something about the content of their own subject position" ("Black Feminist Theory" 46). As Collins and Delores Williams both suggest (in Sisters in the Wilderness), the surrogate maternity and emotional labor required of black women within the institution of the mammy-hood (in slavery and in decades of domestic service) comprised one expression of this "employment" or "sacrifice."

(16.) As a Jew living among Blacks, of course, Norton is both a fellow outsider to the majority culture and an outsider to (or "within') the Black community.

(17.) Brooks's ironic punning on names comes into play here as well: "Loam" refers to a friable (or fragile) soil mixture. Loam Norton, however, is trapped like the other Meccans in a concrete desert.

(18.) In Conjuring Culture, Theophus Smith argues that the maintenance of opposites in tension is an important part of black cultural and sacred practices. The idea of "pharmakon"--or that which functions as both poison and cure--is significant to his discussion.

(19.) Madhubuti may have something like this in mind when he states that "she has created form to fit an urban content" (xi). One critic of "in the Mecca" sees this "layering" method as a weakness, arguing that the poem "ought to have ... unrelenting directness ... but is overwrought with effects --alliterations, internal rhymes, whimsical and arch observations--that distract from its horror almost as if to conceal the wound at its center" (Rosanthal [1969], in Wright 27). This, it seems to me, is a deliberate strategy to mimic the effects of tenement living--too much life, too much detail (beautiful and horrible) crowded into a space too small to contain it, all of it cluttering and obscuring the deepest tragedies and potentialities.

(20.) While some of her friends and colleagues were emigrating from the States to countries in Africa, she appears not to have considered this seriously.

(21.) One of the poems in "After Mecca," the latter part of the collection In the Mecca, is called "Malcolm X." In it, Brooks writes, "And in a soft and fundamental hour / a sorcery devout and vertical / beguiled the world. / He opened us--/ who was a key, / who was a man" (39). Malcolm's life and vision--both political and spiritual--are pictured as opening and releasing black people from internal and external means of confinement.

(22.) This description concludes John Bartlow Martin's commentary, which introduces Brooks's poem (2).

(23.) In his piece on the building for Harper's Magazine, Martin quotes one Mecca resident as follows: "They say they gonna place us somewhere. Place us! I don't wanta be placed anywhere myself. They might place me in some mudhole somewhere and I never did live like that" (97).

(24.) According to Martin's description (2).

(25.) Certainly this image of the female prostitute--as vain, self-absorbed devourer--appears to lack a certain critical feminist edge. Insofar as it portrays the destructive effects of white standards of beauty upon black women, in particular, it actually challenges traditional misogynistic representations, however. I should also point out that Hyena is just one of many female figures in the poem (including Pepita and Mrs. Sallie), and that Jamaican Edward provides a male counterpoint. He, in fact, is the more violent "hyena"--preying on the small and helpless wanderer in the Mecca-desert.

(26.) Greasley cites Brooks (Report 81) quoting Lerone Bennett.

(27.) Matthew 19:16-25. In this episode, a rich young man turns away from discipleship because Jesus tells him he must sell all that he has and give the money to the poor. When he turns away in grief, the teacher explains to his followers that it easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

(26.) See Crossan's In Parables, 53ff, for an explanation of parables of inversion. The gospel story of the rich young man, discussed above, also hinges on social reversals. Indeed, Jesus comments to his disciples on the coming kingdom: "But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first" (Matthew 19:30).

(29.) In Say That the River Turns, a compilation edited by Madhubuti in tribute to Brooks, images such as mother, prophet, priestess, and goddess recur in younger writers' tributes to the poet. For example, Ginger Mance, in the poem "She," writes: "She / wakes spirits within us / old and young calls forth / the yet to come" (25).

(30.) Miller has a particularly religious focus in his reading of the poem, highlighting biblical, sermonic, and prophetic elements. The tie between spiritual and literary emphases comes, for example, in his analysis of Melodie Mary's identification with roaches and rats. He concludes that the point is "not that life is crushed inevitably, it is, rather, that even the most lowly insect is sacred.... Although the imagery indicates naturalism, the statement suggests transcendentalism" (149).

Works Cited

Bernstein, Charles. A Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.

Brooks, Gwendolyn. Annie ,Mien. New York: Harper, 1949.

--. The Bean Eaters. New York: Harper, 1960

--. In the Mecca. New York: Harper, 1968.

--. "Of Flowers and Fire and Flowers." Madhubuti 1-2.

--. Report from Part One. Detroit: Broadside, 1972.

--. Riot. Detroit: Broadside, 1969.

--. Selected Poems, New York: Harper, 1963.

--. A Street in Bronzeville. New York: Harper, 1945.

--. To Disembark. Chicago: Third World P, 1981.

Brown, Patricia L., et al., eds. To Gwen With Love. Chicago: Johnson, 1971.

Cannon, Katie Geneva. Black Womanist Ethics. Atlanta: Scholars, 1988.

Clark, Norris B. "Gwendolyn Brooks and a Black Aesthetic." Mootry and Smith 81-99.

Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Crossan, John Dominic. In Parables. New York: Harper, 1973.

Engle, Paul. "Chicago Can Take Pride in New, Young Voice in Poetry." 1945. Wright 3-4.

Erkkila, Betsy. The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, Literary History, and Discord. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

Evans, Mari. "Afterward." Madhubuti 84.

Fuss, Diana, ed. Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Greasley, Philip A. "Gwendolyn Brooks's 'Afrika.'" Midamerica 13 (1986): 9-18.

Guy-Sheftall, Beverly. "The Women of Bronzeville." Wright 153-64. hooks, bell. Yearning. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1990.

Hull, Gloria T., and Posey Gallagher. "Update on Part One: An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks." CLA Journal21.1 (1977): 19-40.

Jaffe, Dan. "Gwendolyn Brooks: An Appreciation from the White Suburbs" 1969. Wright 50-59.

Keith, Michael, and Steve Pile. Place and the Politics of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Kent, George E. A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1990.

--. "The Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks." 1971. Wright 66-80.

Lee, Don L. (Haki Madhubuti). "Gwendolyn Brooks: Beyond the Wordmaker--The Making of an African Poet." Preface to Brooks, Report from Part One 13-30.

Madhubuti, Haki (Don L. Lee), ed. Say That the River Turns: The Impact of Gwendolyn Brooks. Chicago: Third World P, 1987.

Martin, John Bartlow. "The Strangest Place in Chicago." Harper's Magazine Dec. 1950: 86-97.

Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.

Melhem, D.H. "In the Mecca." Wright 161-81.

Miller, R. Baxter. "Define ... the Whirlwind': Gwendolyn Brooks's Epic Sign for a Generation." 1986. Wright 146-60.

Mootry, Maria K., and Gary Smith, eds. A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987.

Moraga, Cherrie, and Gloria Anzaldua, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table, 1981.

Redding, J. Saunders. "Cellini-Like Lyrics: A Review of Annie Alien." 1949. Wright 6-7.

"Review of A Street in Bronzeville." 1945. Wright 5.

Smith, Barbara. "Black Feminist Theory and the Representation of the 'Other.' "Wall 38-57. --, ed. Home Girls. New York: Kitchen Table, 1983.

Smith, Gary. "Paradise Regained: The Children of Gwendolyn Brooks's Bronzeville." Mootry and Smith 126-39.

Smith, Theophus. Conjuring Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.

Stafford, William. "Books that Look Out, Books that Look In." 1969. Wright 26.

Tate, Claudia. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983.

Traylor, Eleanor. "Our MZ Brooks: Clearing Space at the LOC." Madhubuti 59-60.

Wall, Cheryl, ed. Changing Our Own Words. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989.

Williams, Delores. Sisters in the Wilderness. Maryknoll Orbis P, 1993.

Wright, Stephen Caldwell, ed. On Gwendolyn Brooks: Reliant Contemplation. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996.

Sheila Hassell Hughes is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Dayton, where she teaches multicultural American literature, women's studies, and religion and literature. Her work on Gwendolyn Brooks comes out of her Ph.D. dissertation on women's literature and feminist theology (Institute for Women's Studies, Emory U, 1997).