Sterling Brown's Southern Strategy: Poetry as Cultural Evolution in Southern Road

Abstract

Sterling Brown’s Southern Strategy: Poetry as Cultural Evolution in Southern Road David Anderson (bio) With the publication of Southern Road in 1932, Sterling Brown portrayed, and sought to address, what he perceived to be a profound cultural crisis facing African Americans: the gradual disappearance of their rural cultures as they entered the urban, industrialized economies of the North and South, and their consequent loss of autonomous art. Brown especially feared the loss of folklore, which he believed helped African-American culture renew itself, not only by preserving and strengthening traditions and social practices, but also by serving as a conduit through which individuals devised and communicated new strategies for surviving racial oppression. Once African Americans moved to urban areas, Brown believed that they would no longer produce songs and stories reflecting their communities’ needs and interests and, accordingly, would no longer devise and communicate new strategies for survival. Instead, he feared they would passively consume a bigoted popular culture, or worse yet, be co-opted into producing art that pandered to the economic demands and stereotypes of the dominant culture. In response, Southern Road was not merely an attempt to preserve oral traditions on the printed page, but to adapt the cultural production of art in black communities to an urban, capitalist society. In a close reading of “Strong Men,” I examine Brown’s portrayal of folklore as an evolving cultural process that adapts and preserves traditions despite external changes and threats. In addition, with readings of “Children’s Children” and “Cabaret,” I discuss Brown’s portrayal of mass culture and commercialism as threats both to folk traditions and to artistic creation. Finally, I examine Brown’s attempt to write poetry that, despite the distance between writer and audience, could perform many of the social functions traditionally performed by folklore. Although numerous scholars praise Brown’s poetry for its realism, cultural authenticity, and portrayal of folklore’s social usefulness, they do not analyze Brown’s ideas concerning folklore’s role in cultural evolution—specifically, art’s role in adapting cultural practices to social or environmental changes or threats. For instance, such scholars as Stephen Henderson, Charles Rowell, and Joanne Gabbin have written extensively on Brown’s reliance on vernacular traditions, and both John Wright and Gabbin discuss Brown’s portrayal of folklore’s functions within the black community, such as maintaining group values, identities, traditions, and loyalties. Nevertheless, these studies do not emphasize Brown’s conception of culture as a process and folklore’s important role within that process, so that black culture and [End Page 1023] consciousness in these works often seems unitary and static, even transhistorical—that is, exempt, to quote Ronald Radano, from “the circumstances of political, cultural, and social change” (73). Even when Houston Baker notes the “self-conscious evolutionism” of the final “Vestiges” section of Southern Road, in which Brown cordons off his early Romantic poetry as an aesthetic dead end, Baker reads the section only as Brown’s comment about his artistic development, not as a broader comment about the relationship between African-American art and culture (Baker 100; see Brown, Collected Poems 115). 1 Nevertheless, Brown’s criticism and poetry overtly link artistic production to cultural evolution and group survival. For instance, in arguing for realistic portrayals of all elements of black life, not merely of the educated and middle class, Brown wrote: We are cowed. We have become typically bourgeois. Natural though such an evolution is, if we are all content with evasion of life, with personal complacency, we as a group are doomed. (“Our Literary Audience” 46) Brown presented this threat in “Tin Roof Blues,” the penultimate section in Southern Road which documents the social problems wrought by the Great Migration. Some recent migrants suffer from social alienation: Gang of dicties here, an’ de rest want to git dat way, Dudes an’ dicties, others strive to git dat way, Put pennies on de numbers from now unto de jedgement day. (Collected Poems 102.10–12) Others experience personal and sexual insecurity (“Effie”), cultural alienation (“Children’s Children”), conspicuous consumption (“Mecca,” “Sporting Beasley”), sexual exploitation (“Chillen Get Shoes,” “Harlem Street Walkers”), and cultural co-optation (“Cabaret”). The ten “Vestiges” poems which...