Risk, Envy and Fear in Sterling Brown's Georgics

Abstract

Risk, Envy and Fear in Sterling Brown’s Georgics Michael Collins (bio) He warns us of tumults, treacheries and wars, The trouble festering beneath the surface of things —Virgil 1 Georgic is derived from the Greek words ge, meaning earth, and ergon, meaning work. It is a poem about working the earth, about the arts of agriculture. But more than that it is poem about the arts of peace, the beating of swords into plowshares. —Robert Wells 2 A. The Cotton Kingdom Like the Georgics of Virgil, from which a farmer could learn about beekeeping and its link to the anger of Orpheus, and more generally learn the linked arts of agriculture and community, the poetry of Sterling Brown teaches us about that great constant in agriculture and in the life of mortals: risk. Brown’s hard-nosed account of segregated America shows how risk hums in brains like the bees in their hives, and how, driven for a time out of one life, or even out of a whole community, risk migrates into others, descending in clouds, stinging men and beasts to death. Because of this prominence of risk in his work and because of his focus on African Americans, who were brought to the new world as commodities and have been engaged in an ever-more-successful struggle to escape that status ever since, Brown’s poems—again like Virgil’s Georgics—have many surprising links to economics. So, in what follows, what at first hearing may sound like the mere money-grubbing arcana of the dismal science and of risk management as practiced by today’s portfolio managers, will turn out, in coincidental parallel after parallel with Brown’s poems, to be the stuff of life and death, misery and happiness. “Children of the Mississippi,” from Brown’s 1932 first book Southern Road, is one of his greatest poems, not least because it preserves the impression risk makes on the mind: fear. Brown’s language, at its flood in this poem, captures not only the precariousness of the farmer faced by flood, but the more widespread mortal dread of the “trouble festering beneath the surface of things”: [End Page 950] These know fear; for all their singing As the moon thrust her tip above dark woods, Tuning their voices to the summer night, These folk knew even then the hints of fear. . . . They have seen Blackwater creeping, slow-footed Fate, Implacably, unceasingly Over their bottomlands, over their cornshocks, Past highwater marks, past wildest conjecture, Black water creeping before their eyes, Rolling while they toss in startled half sleep. . . . . . . . . These folk know grief. They have seen Black water gurgling, lapping, roaring, Take their lives’ earnings, roll off their paltry Fixtures of home, things as dear as old hearthgods. These have known death. Surprising, rapacious of cattle, of children, Creeping with the black water Secretly, unceasingly. Death pick out new waysNow fo’ to come to us,Black water creepin’While folks is sleepin,Death on de black waterUgly an’ treacherous. The poem captures, above all else, the fear of the blow, economic or otherwise, that cannot be overcome, and the struggle to prevent the mind from collapsing under the weight of fear, if only by wrapping it in a protective sheath of words, some flash of understanding: “Death pick out new ways/ Now fo’ to come to us . . .” If there is any doubt that a poem like “Children of the Mississippi” is intended to stand, like Virgil’s Georgics, as news about far more than farming, one need only look at a more overtly philosophical poem of Brown’s, the 1927 sonnet “Salutamus.” A plausible reading of this work, with its epigraph from Henry IV, Part I (“O Gentlemen the time of Life is short”), might present it as a cry against racism. But it is truer to the universal depths of Brown’s thought to think of it as a lament about mortality and its many risks: The bitterness of days like these we know; Much, much we know, yet cannot understand [End Page 951] What was our crime that such a searing brand Not of our choosing, keeps us hated so. Despair and disappointment only...