A Son's Return: Selected Essays of Sterling A. Brown

A Son's Return: Selected Essays of Sterling A. Brown. Ed. Mark A. Sanders. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996. xxii + 314 pp. $15.95 paper. In the Foreword to this collection of essays, Mark Sanders offers a basic introduction to the life and work of Sterling Brown, from his insistence on claiming a part in a "New Negro Movement" rather than a "Harlem Renaissance" to his part in the 1938-40 Gunnar Myrdal study of the Negro in America. Brown's consuming interest in African American music and dialect, Sanders writes, was directed toward correcting the "middle-class exclusivity" of the Movement and introducing "a new and vital self-awareness" into the study of African American life and literature. Sanders ends his Foreword to this collection by naming Sterling Brown a "raconteur taken with the near-limitless possibilities language offers," an apt appraisal of the man who is now being called the "Dean of American Negro Poets." The title essay, "A Son's Return," proves Sanders's point well. It is the text of a speech delivered at Williams College in 1973 when Brown was teaching at Howard. In his "rambling" to the audience at Williams, he likens himself to both Euro- and African-American writers and offer no quarter even to scholars whom he respects or to Williams, the college where he earned his undergraduate degree: I am the best liar at Howard University, in the Mark Twain tradition. I can outlie Ralph Bunche, who was a great liar ... J. Saunders Redding stated that one quality of Negro folklore was that they had no dirty stories except in the dirty dozens. And I want to know what fraternity houses J. Saunders Redding did not go into. In the same speech, Brown speaks of the racial segregation during his time at Williams, but he laughs--in the best of the Mark Twain tradition. Although he credits the college with teaching him how to read and to write, at least someone in the audience must have wondered whether this controversial critic and poet was praising or blaming his school. Later in the same speech, he contends: "My standards are not white. My standards are not black. My standards are human." Throughout these essays, Brown insists that art should be judged on its quality, not its genesis in one or another race or culture, but that the culture from which each artist springs must be acknowledged as the wellhead of creativity. Brown lived--and wrote--by what he believed. The essays following "A Son's Return" are grouped by general topic: "African Americans and American Politics"; "American Literature"; "African American Music and Folk Culture"; and "Reviews." Many of the major essays are included: "Negro Character as Seen by White Authors" (1933); "The American Race Problem as Reflected in American Literature" (1939); "Count Us In" (1945); "The New Negro in Literature (1925-1955)" (1955). The four essays on music and folk culture are knowledgeable, balanced, seminal works on the value of folk art and the dangers of ideological partisanship. In his discussion of the origin of spirituals, Brown warns again that we must consider any cultural product as it stands and not as we would have it for political purposes: "Extremists have set up the controversy as between Africanism, or complete originality, and white camp-meeting derivation, or complete unoriginality. This oversimplication does injustice to the careful scholarship of some of the men on both sides." Throughout the essays, he returns to the same theme: We all take from and give to American culture; we are all, then, equal in fact if not yet in public recognition or political power. This collection of essays would make an excellent companion volume for an undergraduate course in twentieth-century American literature. Brown read widely; he spoke plainly; and he knew great literature, whatever its source. Many of the works he thought excellent have been nearly forgotten; but he valued them only if they combined "integrity and artistry," as he wrote of Evelyn Scott's The Wave. …