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Contains a selection of poems from three earlier books: "A Street in Bronzeville," "Annie Allen," and "The Bean Eaters" as well as some new selections.

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Brooks, Gwendolyn, 1917-2000 (Author)
Format: Book
Language:English
Published: New York : Harper & Row, Publisher, [1963]
Subjects:
African Americans > Poetry.
Poetry.
Noirs américains > Poésie.
African Americans.
African Americans > Poetry
poetry.
Poésie.
Table of Contents:
  • A Street in Bronzeville. Kitchenette building
  • The mother
  • Southeast corner
  • Hunchback girl : She thinks of Heaven
  • A song in the front yard
  • The ballad of chocolate Mabbie
  • The preacher : Ruminates behind the sermon
  • Sadie and Maud
  • The independent man
  • Of De Witt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery
  • The vacant lot
  • The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith
  • Negro hero
  • Gay Chaps at the Bar
  • Still I do keep my look, my identity
  • My dreams, my works, must wait till after hell
  • Looking
  • Piano after war
  • Mentors
  • The white troops had their orders but the negroes looked like men
  • Firstly inclined to take what it is told
  • "God works in a mysterious way"
  • Love note I : Surely
  • Love note II : Flags
  • The progress
  • Annie Allen. Notes From the Childhood and the Girlhood. Clogged and soft and sloppy eyes
  • Chicken, she chided early, should not wait
  • After the baths and bowel-work, he was dead
  • Late Annie in her bower lay
  • The duck fats rot in the roasting pan
  • "Do not be afraid on no"
  • But can see better there, and laughing here
  • The Anniad. Think of sweet and chocolate
  • Appendix to the Anniad. You need the untranslatable ice to watch
  • The certainty we two shall meet by God
  • Oh mother, mother, where is happiness
  • The Womanhood. People who have no children can be hard
  • What shall I give my children? Who are poor
  • And shall I prime my children, pray, to pray?
  • First fight. Then fiddle. Ply the slipping string
  • When my dears die, the festival-colored brightness
  • Life for my child is simple, and is good
  • Sweet Sally took a cardboard box
  • A light and diplomatic bird
  • Carried her unprotesting out the door
  • They get to Benvenuti's. There are booths
  • The dry brown coughing beneath their feet
  • And if sun comes
  • One wants a teller in a time like this
  • People protest in sprawling lightless ways
  • Men of careful turns, haters of forks in the road
  • The Bean Eaters. In honor of David Anderson Brooks, my father
  • My little 'bout-town gal
  • Strong men, riding horses
  • The bean eaters
  • We real cool
  • Old Mary
  • A Bronzeville mother loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi mother burns bacon
  • The last quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till
  • Mrs. Small
  • Jessie Mitchell's mother
  • The Chicago Defender sends a man to Little Rock
  • The lovers of the poor
  • A sunset of the city
  • A man of middle class
  • The crazy woman
  • Bronzeville man with a belt in the back
  • A lovely love
  • A penitent considers another coming of Mary
  • Bronzeville woman in a red hat
  • In Emanuel's nightmare : Another coming of Christ
  • The Ballad of Rudolph Reed
  • New Poems. Riders to the blood-red wrath
  • The empty woman
  • To be in love
  • Of Robert Frost
  • Langston Hughes
  • A Catch of Shy Fish. Garbageman : The man with the orderly mind
  • Sick man looks at flowers
  • Old people working (garden, car)
  • Weaponed woman
  • Old tennis player
  • A surrealist and Omega
  • Spaulding and François
  • Big Bessie throws her son into the street.