A LUCILLE CLIFTON–INSPIRED STERLING BROWN TEACHING FABLE
For the Fall 2022 special issue of MQR, “Fractured Union: American Democracy on the Brink,” we reached out to a range of esteemed authors to write short essays that respond to Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again.”
“Let America be America again.” Sterling Brown began addressing the aspiring, emerging, and deluded Black student poets of his literary salon some unspecified evening in the District of Columbia. He spoke at the frequency of commandments given by a poet lord in command of the language of his kidnappers. His lesson plan unfolded again and again between 1926 and 1968 as he hunted for the true poets dormant and emergent. Ster’ Brown he was called by the trees and stars because the moles on his face branched into stars over time. When Hughes says, “Let it be the dream it used to be,” asked the Stare—the name accorded him by students struck dumb as proverbial deer—“does he refer to the childhood of America or does he refer to the boy he was?” He shares a photograph of Langston Hughes reading the poem over his typewriter. Then a photo of Hughes at twelve. Professor Brown asked members of the literary salon to repeat to themselves “America never was America to me” until reaching a frequency that made them shake or vibrate. He uttered his command most encouragingly; still, some of the young poets of the salon faded immediately into the subject of the poem. Others said the lines aloud along with Brown, nodding their heads, but letting the spell go as they scattered home. Most ceased being poets before they graduated. Though Brown’s best student, Lucille Clifton, dropped out of Howard after her sophomore year, she repeated the refrain when she returned to Buffalo to become a mother and wife. “America never was America to me.” She immediately understood a frequency could be unlocked allowing listeners to retune the lines of the poem. “America never was America to me” with a punch to America or a punch to never. “America never was America to me” in the beginning and gradually with variety. “America never was America to me” in the mirror and into the pillow wherever she found mirrors or pillows in her day. She thinks back on Brown’s reading the poem when she was his student. Had he wept that day? There had been some discussion of Whitman hiding in the poem like a god and slave master. And some anecdote featuring a shirtless, drunk, laughing Hughes the night before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Congress tried him for communism. Hughes thought he would be sent to prison. Brown said he’d never seen him that drunk. The poet, aged now on a stage with another great poet in New York in 2001, said she should not be telling that story when asked what it was like to be Sterling Brown’s student. In heaven, for my achievements, I aim for the Sterling Brown teaching award.
For more from the Fall 2022 special issue of MQR, “Fractured Union: American Democracy on the Brink,” you can purchase the issue here.
