KU News Release

KU professor publishes second book on work, life of Sterling A. Brown

LAWRENCE — The late African-American poet, folklorist and university professor Sterling A. Brown was as at home with tenant farmers and sharecroppers as he was among scholars of British literature.

John Edgar Tidwell, a professor of English at the University of Kansas who has just published his second book on Brown, said that it was through the voices, literally the speech, of black folk of the rural south in the 1920s and 1930s that Brown found his calling — his own voice. Brown’s legacy profoundly shaped the development of African-American literary and cultural studies.

Released this spring by Oxford University Press, “After Winter: The Art and Life of Sterling A. Brown” is a collection of new and exemplary work edited by Tidwell and Steven C. Tracy of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. In 2007, Tidwell and Mark Sanders of Emory University published “A Negro Looks at the South by Sterling A. Brown.” Tidwell also is working on a biography of Brown.

When Brown died in 1989 at age 88, he had published three books of poetry, including “Southern Road,” and three more books on African-American literary and cultural history. He had taught more than 50 years at Howard University in Washington, D.C. His students included Ossie Davis, Toni Morrison, Sherley Ann Williams and Amiri Baraka.

Tidwell is among a handful of scholars of African-American literature working to reawaken a general readership to Brown’s enduring significance. Tidwell’s new book with Tracy includes not only new and previously published essays, but also interviews with Brown and his students; two discographies of source material; and an updated version of the most comprehensive bibliography of Brown’s published writings.

“(Brown) once described himself as a minor poet but a major teacher. But I think he was self-effacing when he said ‘minor’ poet,” said Tidwell, who rates the quality of Brown’s creative works as comparable to contemporaries such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.

“As writers and poets, Brown, Hughes and Hurston led the way in using the words of common black people to reveal the humanity of African-Americans,” Tidwell said. Yet their use of folk wit and wisdom was controversial and criticized by black writers seeking to depict the black middle class.

What they didn’t do was attempt to write black speech as dialect, which stereotyped people lacking formal education as ignorant, Tidwell said. Instead, Brown as well as Hughes and Hurston used vernacular speech to reveal the philosophical insight of people who struggled day by day to survive in a nation where blacks were still regarded as three-fifths of a person as defined by the framers of the Constitution for tax purposes. For tenant farmers or sharecroppers, the additional vagaries of weather further threatened survival.

The blues phrase “been down so long … that down don’t bother me” has often been interpreted as defeatist, “but Sterling understood it as philosophical stoicism meaning a sense of determination,” Tidwell noted. “It was an expression of empowerment and resolve in the face of overwhelming forces that sought to keep a people down.”

In his poem “Strange Legacies,” Brown described a farmer and his wife in despair of the destruction of their crops and home by a 1927 Mississippi flood yet resigned to stay. The poem’s refrain has the husband saying to his wife: “Guess we’ll give it one mo’ try / Guess we’ll give it one mo’ try.”

A graduate of Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., and Harvard University in Cambridge, Brown was the son of a minister and faculty member at Howard. Until his first teaching job at a traditional black seminary and college in Lynchburg, Va., the young scholar had spent little time among rural black families.

“Sterling said that he learned the arts and sciences at Williams, but he learned the humanities at Lynchburg,” Tidwell said. When a student regularly fell asleep in class, Brown decided to visit the student’s parents who were farmers. Brown not only began to understand the physical demands of farming, but also to recognize language and lore that represented black people authentically, Tidwell said. The Lynchburg farmers inspired his poem “After Winter” in which a father looks forward to spring.

“He snuggles his fingers / In the blacker loam / The lean months are done with / The fat to come.

His eyes are set on a brushwood-fire / But his heart is soaring higher and higher

Butter beans for Clara / Sugar corn for Grace / An’ fo’ de little feller, runnin’ space.”

Tidwell has researched and written about other writers and journalists whose careers began in the 1920s and 1930s including Langston Hughes, Gordon Parks and Frank Marshall Davis.

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