Annie Allen is a hero for our times, and for all time � even though she is not rich or famous, even though she does not sing before large audiences orAnnie Allen is a hero for our times, and for all time � even though she is not rich or famous, even though she does not sing before large audiences or play roles in movies. Rather, Annie Allen is a hero because she learns and grows and endures � like so many of the ordinary people whose lives and travails Gwendolyn Brooks chronicled in some of the greatest American poetry ever written. Brooks’s collection Annie Allen won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1949 � Brooks was the first African American writer ever to receive the honour � and is a characteristically brilliant example of her work.
Brooks spent virtually all of her life in Chicago, and devoted her literary career to chronicling in poetic form the lives of people whose stories, too often, had not been told or listened to � ordinary African Americans of Chicago, hard-working people with not much money or luck, but with a great deal of inner strength and integrity.
Annie Allen is divided into three main sections. The first section, “Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood,� starts with Annie’s birth, and shares what she learned from her parents Maxie and Andrew, along with conveying impressions of everything from a Sunday chicken dinner to a vaudeville show that features cruel caricatures of African American life. The eleven-part poem concludes with “my own sweet good,� a poem that seems to show Annie Allen, on the cusp of womanhood, focusing on a man in whom she is interested:
“Somewhere, you lattice my berries with bran, Readying for riding my way. You kiss all the great-lipped girls that you can. If only they knew that it’s little today And nothing tomorrow to take or to pay, For sake of a promise so golden, gay, For promise so golden and gay.� (p. 15)
This excerpt from “my own sweet good� captures part of what I so admire about Brooks’s poetry � the subtle, unaffected rhyme scheme; the inspired repetition of the rhyming couplet at the end; the way the stanza conveys the joy of a young woman who senses that the young man who is popular with all the young ladies is choosing her.
The next section of the book is titled “The Anniad.� I sensed the classical allusion at once, and immediately thought of Homer’s Iliad. Yet the more apt allusional path for me to have followed � as I realized after having read a bit of the scholarship on the book � would have been to think of Virgil’s Aeneid. It’s a lovely bit of assonance -- Aeneid/”Anniad� � and it frames well what is truly a heroic poem.
Yet the heroism of the “Anniad� is not that of an Aeneas � carrying his father on his back out of a burning city, descending into the Underworld to gain secret knowledge, fighting the King of the Rutuli in single combat to decide the fate of two empires. Annie Allen’s heroism, like that of many of the characters whose stories are told in Brooks’s poetry, is the heroism of a woman who stays at home, suffers, learns, and endures.
“The Anniad� tells how the man Annie loves goes off to war (like Aeneas) and is undone by the experience (unlike Aeneas), leaving Annie to go on with life alone. Passages of the poem convey how the seasons pass while Annie seeks different ways to carry on with her life in spite of her feelings of loneliness and doubt.
I was particularly moved by a three-part “Appendix to the Anniad� that bears the subtitle “leaves from a loose-leaf war diary.� The last part, titled “the sonnet-ballad,� is one of the most moving things that I have ever read, as Annie Allen looks back at her experience of love and loss:
Oh mother, mother, where is happiness? They took my lover’s tallness off to war, Left me lamenting. Now I cannot guess What I can use an empty heart-cup for. He won’t be coming back here any more. Some day the war will end, but, oh, I knew When he went walking grandly out that door That my sweet love would have to be untrue. Would have to be untrue. Would have to court Coquettish death, whose impudent and strange Possessive arms and beauty (of a sort) Can make a hard man hesitate � and change. And he will be the one to stammer, “Yes.� Oh mother, mother, where is happiness? (p. 32)
The five-part poem “the children of the poor� is included on the Great Books List of Saint John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland � and I can see why the curators of the GBL included it, as it is a characteristically graceful and empathetic example of Brooks’s work. The speaker of the poem begins by remarking that “People who have no children can be hard:/Attain a mail of ice and insolence� (p. 35); the childless, she suggests, have that luxury of detaching from feeling, in contrast to parents who “through a throttling dark…hear/The little lifting helplessness, the queer/Whimper-whine; whose unridiculous/Lost softness makes a trap for us� (p. 35). The situation, the speaker suggests, is particularly acute for people who are poor, and/or who come from a cultural-minority background: “What shall I give my children? who are poor,/Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land� (p. 36).
The poem “the rites for Cousin Vit� is one of those poems that gets referred to as “frequently anthologized�, because indeed it does appear in a great many literature anthologies, like the one I customarily use when teaching my English 201 (Reading and Writing About Text) course at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Perhaps the reason this poem is so frequently anthologized is that, again, Brooks celebrates the everyday heroism of someone who lived with spirit and was true to herself even though she had none of the advantages that can be portioned out, in American society, in terms of factors like income level and skin tone.
We know that Cousin Vit has died � someone “Carried her unprotesting out the door./Kicked back the casket-stand� � but then the speaker assures us that the coffin “can’t hold her,/That stuff and satin aiming to unfold her�. We are assured that Cousin Vit “rises in the sunshine. There she goes,/Back to the bars she knew and the repose/In love-rooms and the things in people’s eyes� (p. 45). Cousin Vit’s vitality (a word that Brooks may well have had in mind whilst composing this poem) is not diminished or cancelled out by the fact of her demise. Indeed, through the last word of the poem Brooks emphasizes that Cousin Vit “Is� � not “was.�
This review can only hint at the glorious richness of this masterwork of poetic diction and humane compassion. The last four lines of the fifteen-part “The Womanhood,� with which Annie Allen closes, provide a fine valedictory, in which Brooks, through Annie Allen, seems to be speaking to us, suggesting a philosophy of life that may help all of us � and especially those of us who have dealt and are dealing with poverty and prejudice � to make our way along:
Rise. Let us combine. There are no magics or elves Or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must Wizard a track through our own screaming weed. (p. 60)
It is a mic-drop conclusion (though, as far as I know, people didn’t use that term in 1949) if ever there was one....more
The house where Esperanza Cordero lives with her family, on Mango Street in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood of Chicago, is not the house that shThe house where Esperanza Cordero lives with her family, on Mango Street in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood of Chicago, is not the house that she would have wanted; at one point, she states that “I want a house on the hill like the ones with the gardens where Papa works.� But as chronicled by Sandra Cisneros, in her 1984 novel The House on Mango Street, Esperanza emerges as a perceptive and courageous young woman, trying against great odds to build a life for herself.
Author Cisneros� life experiences are not exactly like those of protagonist Esperanza, but there are similarities. Cisneros grew up in a family that moved back and forth between Mexico and Chicago; as the only daughter of a family that also included six sons, she learned early that she would have to speak up if she were not to be overlooked. She studied poetry in the renowned creative-writing program of the University of Iowa; and her feelings of isolation there � Iowa is a beautiful state, but is not among the most diverse � may have nourished the way she emphasizes Esperanza’s loneliness in The House on Mango Street, as when Esperanza states early in the book that “Someday I will have a best friend all my own. One I can tell my secrets to. One who will understand my jokes without my having to explain them. Until then I am a red balloon, a balloon tied to an anchor� (p. 8).
The House on Mango Street consists of 44 vignettes. They vary in length, and many of them are quite short � a page or two, even a paragraph or two. Cisneros� training as a poet serves her well, as she crafts what could be described as a novel made up of prose poems. That prose-quality comes through with particular strength in vignettes like “Darius & the Clouds,� in which a character not known for being eloquent, or even terribly bright, suddenly states that “You can never have too much sky. You can fall asleep and wake up drunk on sky, and sky can keep you safe when you are sad. Here there is too much sadness and not enough sky� (p. 33) The character’s observations reinforce the author’s emphasis on Mango Street as a place of limited possibilities.
The Chicago of The House on Mango Street is a landscape of cultural division. In “Those Who Don’t,� Esperanza reflects that “Those who don’t know any better come into our neighborhood scared. They think we’re dangerous. They think we will attack them with shiny knives. They are stupid people who are lost and got here by mistake� (p. 28). She finds their foolish fears ironical. At the same time, she acknowledges that, under other circumstances, she and her Latinx friends might feel much like those accidental visitors to Mango Street: “All brown all around, we are safe. But watch us drive into a neighborhood of another color and our knees go shakity-shake and our car windows get rolled up tight and our eyes look straight. Yeah. That is how it goes and goes� (p. 28).
An important theme of The House on Mango Street is the search for self-definition. Esperanza reflects in “My Name� that “In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings, songs like sobbing� (p. 10).
As The House on Mango Street continues, it becomes clear that another important theme of the novel is the particularly difficult lot of Latina women in the community. They face, of course, racial and cultural discrimination from Chicago-area whites who control the lion’s share of power and money in Chicagoland. “Bums in the Attic� includes Esperanza’s musings on how the cultural geography of the Chicago metropolitan area reflects economic and class bias and cultural discrimination: “People who live on hills sleep so close to the stars they forget those of us who live so much on earth� (p. 86).
But the women of Mango Street also face gender oppression from Latino males who consider male privilege, and domination over women, to be their right by birth. “Marin� tells the story of one of Esperanza’s acquaintances � an older girl with a boyfriend in Puerto Rico. Older and pretty, Marin is considered “too much trouble� because “She is older and knows lots of things�. Women’s intelligence and autonomy, in other words, can be seen as a threat by many in this community. The vignette closes on a note that mixes imagery of hope, helplessness, and isolation: “Marin, under the streetlight, dancing by herself, is singing the same song somewhere. I know. Is waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life� (p. 26).
Those same themes are emphasized in “A Smart Cookie,� in which Esperanza’s mother, while cooking a meal, tells Esperanza that “Shame is a bad thing, you know. It keeps you down. You want to know why I quit school? Because I didn’t have nice clothes. No clothes, but I had brains. Yup, she says disgusted, stirring again. I was a smart cookie then� (p. 90). The reader senses that Esperanza’s mother is warning her daughter: an education is the only thing that can save Esperanza from a lifetime as a second-class citizen along Mango Street.
A woman’s lack of choice in a difficult social situation is also an area of emphasis in “No Speak English,� a vignette that tells the story of Mamacita, “the big mama of the man across the street, third-floor front�. She has come with their baby from another country, and she only speaks eight words of English. She quarrels with her husband because she wants to go back to their native country and he doesn’t: “And then, to break her heart forever, the baby boy, who has begun to talk, starts to sing the Pepsi commercial he heard on T.V. No speak English, she says to the child in the language that sounds like tin. No speak English, no speak English, and bubbles into tears. No, no, no, as if she can’t believe her ears� (p. 77). The meaning of “No speak English� changes from “I don’t speak English� to “No! Don’t speak English!� Mamacita sees her son starting to imbibe the language and the commercialist values of a different culture, and she feels unable to do anything about it.
The potential danger that men pose to women and girls of the community is emphasized by “The First Job,� a vignette that describes a frightening incident from Esperanza’s first job at a photo-finishing shop on North Broadway:
I guess it was the time for the night shift or middle shift because a few people came in and punched the time clock, and an older Oriental man said hello and we talked for a while about my just starting, and he said we could be friends and next time to go in the lunchroom and sit with him, and I felt better. He had nice eyes and I didn’t feel so nervous anymore. Then he asked if I knew what day it was, and when I said I didn’t, he said it was his birthday and would I please give him a birthday kiss. I thought I would because he was so old and just as I was about to put my lips on his cheek, he grabs my face with both hands and kisses me hard on the mouth and doesn’t let go. (p. 54)
This passage looks ahead to later vignettes that emphasize the dangers of sexual assault for the women and girls of Mango Street. The presentation of this subject matter is restrained and responsible, and is all the more disturbing for that reason � part of why The House on Mango Street has faced banning attempts in various school and community libraries across the U.S.A.
Cisneros states, in the book’s preface, that she wanted to compose The House on Mango Street in such a way that readers from her community could turn to any place in the book, read one of the vignettes, and benefit from it, even if they hadn’t read the vignettes that came before. The book does seem to work that way, though there is a narrative line centering around Esperanza’s eventual decision to leave the community. In “The Three Sisters,� Esperanza goes to see three older women who are relatives of her friends Lucy and Rachel, and who have come into town after the death of Lucy and Rachel’s baby sister. Like three Fates, they offer Esperanza the chance to make a wish, assure her that her wish will come true, and add, “When you leave you must remember to come back for the others. A circle, understand? You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can’t erase what you know. You can’t forget who you are� (p. 104).
And in “Mango Says Goodbye Sometimes,� the last vignette in the collection, Esperanza reflects on how her imminent departure from Mango Street is a Hasta luego (“See you later�) and not an Adios (“Goodbye�). She states quite directly that she intends to return, so that she can help others who are stuck in situations like what she has experienced, and she says of her fellow Latinas that “They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot get out� (p. 109).
The concision of The House on Mango Street is key to its power and resonance. It is a book that one could read quickly � though it would be a profound mistake to do so. This novel, with its poetic texture and its insights into character and culture, lends itself to repeat readings. Read it aloud, for a full appreciation of its poetic qualities....more
Miami Beach, in August of 1968, was the site of the Republican National Convention that nominated Richard Nixon for the office of President of the UniMiami Beach, in August of 1968, was the site of the Republican National Convention that nominated Richard Nixon for the office of President of the United States. Later that same month, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago nominated Hubert Humphrey for the same office � but not until after anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in the city had been brutally and violently put down by Chicago police officers acting on the orders of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley. Norman Mailer attended both conventions as a roving reporter for Ჹ’s magazine; and his observations of, and participation in, that tumultuous time are set forth in a vivid little 1968 book titled Miami and the Siege of Chicago.
Norman Mailer is widely regarded as one of the most important American writers of the mid- to late 20th century � and no one could ever accuse him of avoiding controversy. His debut novel The Naked and the Dead (1948), which drew from his World War II experiences fighting in the Philippine Campaign with the 112th Cavalry Regiment of Texas National Guardsmen, garnered attention for its curse words and sexual references. Such things are de rigueur for a war novel nowadays, but were definitely something new in 1948.
And Mailer kept on trying, throughout his career, to achieve something new through his literary work. The Armies of the Night (1968), with its attention-getting subtitle of History as a Novel/The Novel as History, won a Pulitzer Prize for the way in which Mailer chronicled the 1967 March on the Pentagon, an event at which 50,000 demonstrators convened at the Northern Virginia headquarters of the United States military to protest the Vietnam War. It was the time of what was then called the “New Journalism�; and The Armies of the Night, like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) before it, functions as a “non-fiction novel� � a genre in which the writer freely juxtaposes novelistic techniques and even fictional conversations with real-life events, acting on the belief that the mix of the fictional and non-fictional can help achieve a higher truth than what straightforward reportage could provide.
Miami and the Siege of Chicago, like The Armies of the Night, works within the conventions of the “non-fiction novel.� A clever conceit of this book is the way in which Mailer inserts himself into the story as a character, referred to simply as “the reporter�! By this means, Mailer can impart a greater sense of objectivity to his observations, recording them in the 3rd rather than the 1st person, while at the same time reminding the reader of the artificiality of this convention in a way that feels quite “meta.�
Miami and the Siege of Chicago is divided into two parts: “Nixon in Miami,� and “The Siege of Chicago.� “Nixon in Miami� is the shorter of the two parts � 82 out of the book’s total 223 pages � and perhaps that discrepancy is inevitable, considering that the Republicans� convention at Miami Beach was not marred by the kind of large-scale violence that occurred outside the Democrats� convention in Chicago.
So, what did “the reporter� see and experience at the Republican National Convention in Miami? Well, it’s complicated. One gets the sense that � as would be the case four years later with gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who covered then-President Nixon’s re-election campaign for his book Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail �72 (1973) � Mailer generally finds Richard Nixon to be a thoroughly despicable character.
Still, the old combat veteran Mailer seems to find that he cannot help respecting Nixon’s sheer tenacity as a campaigner who keeps coming back for one campaign after another, and setbacks be damned. One might recall how, after losing the presidential election of 1960 to John F. Kennedy, and then losing the California gubernatorial election of 1962 to incumbent governor Pat Brown, Nixon told a group of reporters that “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.�
And yet, six years later, there was Nixon again, at Miami Beach, on the verge of nomination as his party’s candidate for President of the United States, sounding “mild, firm, reasonable, highly disciplined� in his responses to press-conference questions. Mailer finds himself asking himself, “Had [Nixon] really improved? The reporter caught himself hoping that Nixon had�.It might even be a measure of the not-entirely-dead promise of America if a man as opportunistic as the early Nixon could grow in reach and comprehension and stature to become a leader� (pp. 49-50).
I will leave it to the reader to decide how much Richard Nixon grew in reach and comprehension and stature, became a leader, between the Miami Beach RNC in 1968 and his resignation from the office of the Presidency in 1974.
Mailer begins “The Siege of Chicago,� the second and longer part of the book, by writing that “It may be time to attempt a summary of the forces at work upon the [Democratic] convention of 1968� (p. 101). Truly, 1968 was a year of tumultuous events:
� January-February: The Tet Offensive, a coordinated series of massed attacks by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces across South Vietnam, fails in its military objectives, but shocks Americans who have been told that the enemy is on the verge of collapse. Opposition to the Vietnam War increases.
� March 31: President Lyndon B. Johnson, in the face of persistently low approval ratings, announces that he “will not seek and shall not accept the nomination of my party as your President.�
� April 4: Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis. Rioting follows in several major U.S. cities.
� April 23: Protests at Columbia University close the university’s campus.
� June 4: Robert F. Kennedy, campaigning for the Democratic nomination for president on an anti-war platform, is assassinated in Los Angeles after winning the California primary.
Against that background of chaos and tragedy, the Democrats prepared to convene in Chicago. In political terms, the Democratic National Convention would be a contest between Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the inheritor of President Johnson’s mantle, and Senator Eugene McCarthy, running on an anti-war platform. In cultural terms, however, a starker and much more violent contest was taking shape.
On one side was a loose coalition of far-left groups like the Youth International Party or “Yippies�; having planned to convene in Chicago to denounce President Johnson’s Vietnam War policies, they had no intention of cancelling their plans just because President Johnson was no longer running for re-election. On the other side was Chicago’s Mayor, Richard J. Daley. An old-style big-city boss who prided himself on his toughness, Mayor Daley wanted the 1968 convention to show the world how his urban-renewal policies had changed Chicago for the better (even though those policies had reinforced and exacerbated racial segregation in an already-segregated city). And he had no intention of letting a bunch of scruffy Yippies and hippies disrupt “his� convention.
Therefore, Mayor Daley � who had given Chicago police a “shoot to kill� order during the riots that followed the assassination of Dr. King � told his police to crack down violently on anti-war protesters in the city. Accordingly, hundreds of protesters, the vast majority of whom were non-violent, were beaten and tear-gassed in locations like Lincoln Park and Grant Park, in what came to be called a “police riot.�
All of this came to a head, in a terribly public manner, in what Mailer calls “the Massacre of Michigan Avenue� (p. 159). A group of protesters made their way to the street in front of the Conrad Hilton hotel, the downtown headquarters hotel for the Democratic Party and the media, where Chicago police set upon them with the same sort of violent tactics they had used in Lincoln Park and Grant Park.
Mailer describes “watching in safety from the nineteenth floor� of the Conrad Hilton, as “children, and youths, and middle-aged men and women were being pounded and clubbed and gassed and beaten, hunted and driven, sent scattering in all directions by teams of policemen who had exploded out of their restraints like the bursting of a boil� (p. 172). It was this moment that was captured by television cameras and broadcast across the nation and around the world, as protesters (aptly enough) chanted, “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!�
The violence even became a subject of conversation on the floor of the Democratic National Convention, with one DNC delegate denouncing the Chicago police’s “Gestapo tactics� and drawing an angry, profane rejoinder from Mayor Daley. Against that backdrop of civil strife, it seems almost an afterthought that the Democratic Party dutifully nominates Hubert Humphrey, a man whom Mailer describes as having “a face which was as dependent on cosmetics as the protagonist of a coffin� (p. 208). Still, the Democrats cheer for their man, as “part of their memory of genteel glamour at Washington parties,� even though “Everybody knew he would lose� (p. 209).
What brought me to Miami and the Siege of Chicago, here in this political season of the year 2024, was the eerie similarities that I saw between the election scene of 1968 and that of today. Consider:
The Republicans nominate a wildly controversial man whose political career has survived a number of seemingly insurmountable setbacks. While he has a history of playing fast and loose with the truth, he pleases older conservative voters, in a time of cultural change, with talk of “law and order� and a “silent majority.� Meanwhile, the Democrats meet in Chicago. The incumbent Democratic president, who had won the previous election with a healthy majority of the popular vote, has given up his quest for re-election after suffering a drastic loss in public approval ratings. He supports, for the nomination, his Vice President. The Vice President, who is understandably grateful to the President at having been chosen for the second highest office in the land, faces the delicate task of supporting the President while achieving some measure of distance from the President’s less popular policies. At the same time, there is concern that protests planned for the Democratic convention in Chicago could degenerate into violence and disrupt the convention.
Which year am I talking about? The year 1968, or the year 2024? Yes.
At the same time, there are differences. Richard Nixon refused in 1960 to litigate his close election loss to John F. Kennedy, on the belief that doing so would be bad for the country. Clearly, Donald Trump was bothered by no such scruples in the wake of his 2020 loss to Joe Biden. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, faced no challenges to her nomination, and was nominated for the Presidency by a notably unified convention. And while there were protests in Chicago at the time of the 2024 DNC � chiefly protests relating to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza � the protests were not marred by violence from either protesters or Chicago police.
What is past is frequently prologue. Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago provides a potent illustration, for our times, of that principle, even as it takes us back to a turbulent moment in American political history....more
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