An Integer Is A Whole Number: a proposed essay, asked for, written, and rejected, as foreword to: A Negro Looks At The South by Sterling Allen Brown, and dedicated to the memory, with 'photograph,' of Prof's 'Lady in her Rose Garden': Daisy Turnbull Brown, the poet's muse: 'his proverbial' 'Rose Anne' by M. S. H.

When Daisy died in June, 1979 I was at Yaddo, the Artists Retreat, in Saratoga Springs, NY; called to the phone by Eloise Spicer and returned to the dinner table without comment, the poet, June Jordan approached and said 'across your face is the sign of death, who died?' and I left that evening for Washington, DC Sterling, of course, was inconsolable. Already I was working on his Collected Poems which I'd selected for the National Poetry Series, and we were beyond deadline.

The book was to be a surprise to Rose Anne after Sterling's 78th birthday celebration at the Museum of African Art in the district. I thought we would have all summer to work on Sterling's poetry collected in one volume. Now I was reading his 'Thoughts on Death' at Daisy's funeral.

I met Daisy at the Brown residence in Brookland, Kearny St. NE on a cold day in January 1973. Sterling answered the door though Daisy had answered the phone. Ernest J. Gaines and I were paying a visit, and a debt from the Black Academy of Arts & Letters banquet in NYC the previous October. All three of us, Ernie, Sterling, and me, and a host of others had been celebrated, 'c.p.' time. Sterling was celebrated as 'Dean of African American Letters,' 'the invisible Mr. Brown' was how he put it at table. Sterling was always in good form with guests; an autodidact at home, and everywhere else, he would be full of questions of Gaines and myself about the Creative Writing Seminars held at the Library of Congress in his home town. Gaines was respectful and quiet, admiring the Brown library, books everywhere, the home tidy. Daisy always deferred to Sterling, though when she was nearby she had the habit of always touching the back of his head, an act of affection one could not miss when visiting their home. Later, during bad times, Sterling would say to me: 'You Did What You Did!' While he maintained a code of silence between us. I would speak to Daisy in the garden 'out back' and she would translate his mood to the millisecond.

I started our conversation with a mention of the 'Vestiges' section of Southern Road, the Brown University library copy I'd studied before our first visit: 'who, pray tell, was 'Rose Anne'?' 'Sterling recited Housman on our honeymoon,' Daisy replied. 'He told me I was his costliest flower and my own conceit.' Sterling broke in, changing the subject: 'Mr. Gaines, I think you've written a fine novel about Miss Jane Pittman; maybe better than Dick Wright, who was no master of local color, or his neighborhood, which in the end was probably Paris not Natchez. Do you think his work suffered because he left the country?'

Gaines, always the diplomat, and polite, called Sterling 'Professor Brown,' said he didn't know much French, but liked Wright's short stories. Gaines wrote his first novel, Catherine Carmier, about a creole character in Louisiana, seven times. His own collection of short stories, Bloodline, was out on the table in front of us. We had just had lunch at the Capitol Grill, then cabbed over, and the two hours we spent chatting went quickly.

I told Sterling about N. Scott Momaday's reading, particularly a poem called 'Plainview 2' about a horse being inculcated into his Kiowa tribal pantheon. Also Ralph Ellison's comments (he gave no formal presentation), and Ralph's avoidance of Paul Engle at cocktail hour. I mentioned my short time at Iowa's Writers Workshop right after the JFK inauguration, the 'physical' I took in Des Moines, Iowa, how I paid my money for a passport and received a draft notice; how quickly I got into graduate school at the State University of Iowa, with Christopher Isherwood, Henri Coulette and Wirt Williams my undergraduate recommenders; how I went to Iowa with no money, my car having broken down in Needles, California, loaded down with books and records.

How many of the locals loved Elliot Coleman from Johns Hopkins. Ernie's reading from The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman was my highlight. I mentioned how many critics had taken Ernie's novel for a real 'autobiography'; how money had been withdrawn because it was only a novel. Ernie said in the cab to National Airport for the flight to Providence, he had an idea of what to read that evening at Brown. It was a week later that I invited Sterling to campus to lecture and read his poetry in April, l973. Daisy said he could travel, by train if he wanted, but she wasn't coming along. The evening of our meeting with the Browns, Ernie read 'Just Like a Tree' from Bloodline. He dedicated his reading to Sterling and his lovely wife, Daisy. And I recorded the reading:

JUST LIKE A TREE

I shall not; I shall not be moved. I shall not; I shall not be moved. Just like a tree that's planted 'side the water. Oh, I shall not be moved. I made my home in glory;' I shall not be moved. Made my home in glory; I shall not be moved. Just like a tree that's planted 'side the water. Oh, I shall not be moved.

                 (from an old Negro spiritual)

Daisy had the strongest, clearest handwriting I can remember, always legible. She was a student of William Faulkner's fiction and poetry, though she was graduated from Virginia Seminary and College in Lynchburg, Virginia. Her parents never married; her father a white Virginian, her mother, 'colored,' died early. It was illegal for them to marry. She was raised by her grandmother, an ex-slave, in Rocky Mount. When Sterling saw her in a white dress one Sunday she had two children, Connie and Jack, in tow, the offspring of her sister who had died of tuberculosis. Daisy and Sterling adopted these children. ['When I first saw Daisy she was a rose without thorns dressed up in a white dress. I was playing tennis; it was Sunday afternoon. It was match point. She had two little kids in tow, 'Connie' and 'Jack;' then the train whistle blew four times: Wheep, wheep, wheep-wheep. She was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. Then I finished my service; and I double-faulted.' (Sterling, on first seeing Daisy)]

The Education of the Poet

Sterling Allen Brown called himself a 4 H Man: Homer, Heine, Hardy, Housman. He became a master teacher, in part, because of his family, the one he was born into, and the one he encompassed as a pioneering teacher and his model, 'Kitty,' George Kittredge, who taught him Shakespeare, line by line, at Harvard. At Williams College, George Dutton taught him 'critical realism.' Sterling had five sisters: Clara, Grace, Edna, Elsie, and Helen, all schoolteachers and older than he. When I asked him why he did not include all five sisters in the poem written for his father, 'After Winter,' Sterling quipped: 'it would mess up the meter.' He was thinking of Robert Frost.

'Odyssey of Big Boy' was the first poem in Sterling's groundbreaking Southern Road, a poem larger than 'Odysseus' because it represented the attributes of an entire people in a given period. He had written the poem in the ballad form because of the flexibility of the form and Brown's mastery of the folk idiom though no single hero could possibly duplicate the action and verve of the poetic cycle in Brown's hands. The title poem, 'Southern Road,' was the first instance of a work song convention parsed with a true narrative, a storyline fully cadenced as a work song 'with a story': and the title of poetic choice was the road, a pioneering book of poems which asked no quarter, and gave none. The 'odyssey' documents, with fluency and grace, the efforts and exploits of an entire people, many poems written in the voice of 'Big Boy' Davis, an illiterate guitar player, 'kicked out of town for vagrancy.' The collection criticizes the annals of segregation and an enforced peonage which could not destroy a fully human family, 'illiterate, but somehow very wise.' Brown's balladry captures melodies of song and feeling made soulful because this journey-motif was Sterling Brown's chordal inheritance, a charting of folk mastery James Weldon Johnson called 'Sterling Brownian,' meaning 'holding its every character with nuance and eloquence as artistry incomparable,' and lovingly written down as epic in rigorous formulation.

No poem like Sterling Brown's 'Strong Men' had been recorded in the 20th century when Charles S. Johnson heard it recited in 1929. Johnson said, 'Sterling, don't you think that poem is too…' – his sentence never completed. The poem was read at Fisk University, where Sterling was teaching at the time – read at the alma mater of his parents, and also the scholar Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, 'father' of The Souls of Black Folk and the first Ph.D. at Harvard University. The Souls was Sterling's favorite book.

His 'Strong Men' was a poem 'militant' in tone, and cleanly written as text. It was a 'chant of inspiration' and advance, written in a primal shorthand, with increments of folk speech only Brown could deliver, and spread out on a unique trellis of invention – 'a singing tree' as fellow Washingtonian, Eugene Pinchback Toomer would describe his trope – Jean Toomer's booklength 'experiment,' Cane, which Sterling knew and drew upon as innovative, 'mysterious,' democratic. The epigraph of Sterling's poem was evocative of Carl Sandburg, Lincoln's biographer, author of The People, Yes.

'Strong Men' was sure-handed, incremental, uncompromisingly clear, a plainly spoken poem of 'deadly' force, and Brown's anthem against local and generic white supremacy. Across this divide 'From the Briar Patch' ideologues at Vanderbilt University stood close by and ready, clearly promoting an 'agrarian' ideology, I'll Take My Stand. Brown had taken his, with poetry clearly basted by folk-say, and triumphant as art freely measured, surprisingly allusive, and sometimes entertaining, yet always framed in what Sterling called 'the folk idiom,' pungent, racy – 'all that his people are.'

It was Sterling Brown who proofread W. E. B. Du Bois's pioneering Black Reconstruction in America. Before it was published, 'the good doctor' gave 'Br'er Sterling' a bottle of crème de menthe as 'thank you' for his trouble. Sterling, who had been weaned on white lightning brewed by country people of rural Black Virginia, accepted Du Bois's bottle, but never drank it. He told a tale of the bottle crystallizing on the stairs of his Kearney St. NE attic.' He would say 'what would have happened had I showed up with that bottle in Coolwell, Virginia, where I honeymooned with Daisy Turnbull Brown at the Bibby farm?' Then Sterling would say to me: 'you're losing your standing as my Telemachus, waiting for his 'Slim Greer' to get home' – a chastisement from the master storyteller, especially when Sterling didn't want to work on his own poems, written so long ago, and all of them his favorites.

The poems 'Sister Lou' and 'Virginia Portrait' are treatments of the same theme: the character and steadfastness of the Bibby family, and its primary agent, Mrs. Bibby – She with slow speech, and spurts of heartfelt laughter, Illiterate, and somehow very wise.

The persona of Sterling's Slim Greer Cycle, though never fully autobiographical, was 'fully drawn,' part 'Gilly' from the Jefferson City, Missouri downtown hotel, part friends and running buddies, in and out of trouble, all 'Sterling Brownian.'

'Ma Rainey' is part John Work's intimate asides and unspoken fears unuttered while avoiding Ma's entreaties, and Sterling Brown's 'collecting' and apprising a vital 'folk-say' at a country concert, without tape recorder. It was Black folk 'chained to the levee' in the 1927 flood, caught in pungent tonalities of Bessie Smith's 'Backwater Blues'; it is also a poem begun in a speakeasy of Chicago's 'black and tan' spun out over tin- pan-alley stereotypes, recorded in Sterling's special parlance, once again 'making in-house jazz corrections' at his own very personal 'Cabaret.' The touch of 'the arranger' as 'teacher,' in deft lineation and stanzaic pacing, was also the poet – diligent, and at work: his 'arrangement' as art 'spun out' to make his reader cry.

When we were building the manuscript from three handwritten notebooks with small assistance on an Olivetti typewriter I had brought along in baggage off a commuter flight from Providence to National Airport, Sterling would delay inclusion of  'Call Boy,' his poem written for Ralph Bunche, or 'Uncle Joe' his agent-provocateur from 'Frilot Cove' – 'creole,' Louisianan, anything but Cajun, or 'Remembering Nat Turner,' written for Roscoe C. Louis, his traveling companion, fellow-collector, and author. In Sterling's copy of The Negro in Virginia is this inscription – 'to Dutch, his book,' signed 'RCL.'

There were stories of Alain Locke's 'editorial control' in limiting the page count of Negro Poetry and Drama and The Negro in American Fiction, paid 'unwillingly'with grants from the Carnegie-Myrdal Study, as an 'adult literacy manual' – and 'no pay granted' for the author-originator, other than books given out to family and 'friends' as Brown's personal 'philanthropy to his own people.' When I asked Sterling 'why he and Dr. Rayford Logan did not collaborate on the writing of the Howard University 'Official' History Project, a true history of the institution': Sterling laughed like 'Scrappy' in his patented poem, 'Puttin' on Dog,' and quipped – 'they wouldn't allow the 'faculty minutes' record I wanted 'in' as any 'true history' of Howard.' Couched in the poet's humor was all the heartwork and discipline of Sterling Brown's institutional loyalty, and many of his personal disappointments.

Sterling assured me his Collected Poems would never see 'light of day' as he traveled by train to New York to meet his editor at Harper & Row, Fran McCullough, in a rainstorm; on that trip he nearly died of pneumonia. When I mailed the copy-edited manuscript of his book from National Airport (now Reagan National Airport) to his publisher in New York City, the book was lost in the mail with no paper trail, no insurance, and no tracer. If the manuscript ended up in the 'dead letter' file at any Terminal Annex in the country, we could never find out. It was a terrible lost weekend. I kept this news from Sterling while a team tried to rebuild the book with the help of Darryl Pinkney, McCullough's assistant at Harper & Row, and a distant relative of Sterling as well. Long hours at the Schomburg Library in Harlem and the 42nd St. Main Branch New York City Library followed. There was no time for proofreading and no galley proofs before publication. Sterling said 'my name alone made me suspect:' – 'did I own any stock in Harper & Row?; wasn't my family name I. W. Harper?' To hide any hurt Sterling remained a punster at heart.

I did not tell Sterling I had had a contract with Harper & Row, a poetry book project rejected by Donald Hall as outside reader, though I kept the $500 advance. This was about the time Ernie Gaines and I met Sterling at the Black Academy of Arts & Letters Awards dinner in New York. When Sterling's book was published in early 1980 I took a copy to Gunnar Myrdal's residence in the old section of Stockholm, Sweden, not far from the famous statue of 'St. George and the Dragon.' I told the consulate diplomat at the airport on my arrival I had one request of him; would he contact Gunnar Myrdal with this message: 'I bring greetings from Sterling Brown.' I was cautioned by my host not to be too hopeful, that everybody wanted to see Gunnar Myrdal. At 11 a.m. I got a call at The Hotel Diplomat. Mr. Myrdal would see me at his residence at 2 p.m. It was Sterling's birthday, May one, 1980.

At the end of Myrdal's An American Dilemma is the hope for 'universal enlightenment,' something Sterling had not seen in his own country: no universal literacy, no democracy, and no 'an integer is a whole number.' American Slavery and its aftermath, 'not so far Up From Slavery as Frederick Douglass's 'sacred effort'' was how Sterling would frame it in his 'Images & Reality' lecture given at Brown in 1973; his own artful commentary from 'the man lowest down,' remained fragmentary, many of its lessons captured in Brown's poems, essays, interviews, still unheeded.

Sterling's seering comment: 'cracker, your breed aint exegetical,' – his answer to Robert Penn Warren's 'n----, your breed aint metaphysical!' – from Warren's 'Pondy Woods' poem written much earlier in the century, was published in the defunct Washington Star, complete with an interview about race relations and race rituals in America, circa 1974. What had prompted Sterling's reply was Warren's voicing of white supremacy couched in the idiom of a local color character. Sterling's answer, up close, was also his pithy comment on Warren's editing books on the nation's prime subject: 'American Negroes,' 'Slavery,' and 'Segregation.'

'What did Robert Penn Warren know about American Negroes, Slavery, or Segregation?' Had he ever been a Negro, a slave, or been segregated? or had he only been raised 'in the briar patch,' an allusion to one of Warren's essays in his 'agrarian' past as a critic of American literature. On questions of prosody and poetics, and his people, Professor Brown conceded nothing. Sterling, by then, had been appointed 'poet laureate' of his hometown by the mayor of Washington DC. The mayor had been one of his students at Howard a generation earlier. Later came an invitation from the Library of Congress: to read his poems, an invitation he accepted 'in the name of his students.'

In a country rife with tribalism and ideology from its inception, a few Sterling Brownian riffs seem timely:

• Prof, you run them verbs; I'll drive the thought. • They're trying to bury 'the hatchet' and it's always in my head. • My Favorite Poem? Every damned one of them. • FFOV?? (He and Arthur Paul Davis, his Howard colleague, in deep discussion on 'miscegenation and the intellect'): First Families of Virginia: all literate Virginians, Black and white, are relatives, one generation removed, whether they can read or write, and some can do neither. • On the theme of the dirty joke: 'What fraternity house did you NOT go into?' • 'The Gourmets' – a social club that 'sprung up' from segregation: • They didn't like the overflow into Harrisons, (a black super-club) so they came down to my basement to relax, then tell lies. •  The best liar was 'thoroughgood.' –  'Thurgood Marshall of Baltimore and the U.S. Supreme Court.' • The Congress and the Faculty of Howard are caught up as' Senegambians and Negritos' – in a deadly 'crab-barrel.' [An allusion to Booker T. Washington's 'Atlanta Compromise Address,' 1895, after the death of Frederick Douglass.] • The first blues record I ever owned was by Mamie Smith, not Bessie, and not Clara.

Sterling gave a talk at the Guggenheim Museum in NYC. The building was closed for renovations, but the auditorium was open. The topic was 'The Education of the Poet,' recorded by Elizabeth Kray of the Academy of American Poets. Sterling rode up on the train with a passel of books, and three notebooks of original poems. It was Allen Tate's birthday, and Tate was being honored in Washington DC for 'lifetime achievement' at the Library of Congress.

Sterling spent most of the evening reading from the published texts of his 'enemies': the agrarians of I'll Take My Stand: Donaldson, Warren, Ransom, Tate. He read only a handful of his own poems. The talk went long, with no 'reception' afterwards. When we were exiting the building Mrs. Kray handed me the recorded cassette tape with her comment: 'This is libelous. I don't think we need to get sued.' It was Robert Frost's birthday, and Sterling had misplaced his notebooks, to be recovered the next day. I Xeroxed his notebooks before returning them to him, his handwritten villanelles and sestinas, his sonnets, most of them Shakespearean, addressed to his 'Rose Anne.' Sam Allen has written the best essay on Sterling and Daisy's honeymoon at Coolwell. Sterling liked to remember 'the love of his life' with his poem 'Conjured.'

I returned to Amherst and Coolwell to read poetry by invitation in the local schools. Amherst, Virginia is the home of Sweetbriar College. In the downtown section are two barbershops, one Black and one white, two doors apart. The Black barber had only a clipper but no scissors. The white barber was fully supplied. The white barber and the Black barber had little business but wouldn't share space: it was tradition. The students, mostly white, with a scattering of Blacks, did not rave over Sterling Brown's poems 'that jumped the gap' of the generations. Jim Bibby, then pitching for the Pittsburgh Pirates, was living in Coolwell. I ended my classroom recital with one of Sterling's favorites, not  'Strong Men' but 'Sister Lou,' Mrs. Bibby safely in heaven:

Honey

Go straight on to de Big House, An' speak to yo' God Widout no fear an' tremblin'. Then sit down An' pass de time of day awhile.   Give a good talkin' to To yo' favorite 'postle Peter, An' rub the po' head Of mixed-up Judas, And joke awhile wid Jonah.   Then, when you gits de chance, Always rememberin' yo' raisin', Let 'em know youse tired Jest a mite tired Jesus will find yo' bed fo' you Won't no servant evah bother wid yo' room. Jesus will lead you To a room wid windows Openin' on cherry trees an' plum trees Bloomin' everlastin'. An' dat will be yours Fo' keeps. Den take yo' time…. Honey, take yo' bressed time.

I was recruited by the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, to select poems from their archives for a poetry album of Black Americans reading their own poems, and to write an essay. Five poetry consultants, now poet laureates, gave their opinions on the suitability of the project: Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, Stanley Kunitz, William Meredith. There is no album extant, though I made my selections and wrote the essay. None could agree about 'an integer is a whole number.' It was Sterling who cautioned me 'about the long haul, being a Pollyanna, or becoming cynical'; where did the funding come from, he would say, who is our benefactor, Howard University, the Congress of these United States? What was a poetry consultant, or a poet laureate? Who was the Librarian of Congress? He was obviously being 'rhetorical.' I thought of Sterling's treatment of Orpheus in his poem, 'Slim in Hell': – 'Den Peter say, 'Go/To Hell an' see,/All dat is doing, and/Report to me.''For a Black Poet one needed more than the proverbial 'lyre' to complete any project, and see it to completion as public trust.

He often said the worst thing that could happen to Negroes was a Harvard education.  Both he and Ralph Bunche had attended Harvard, as had Locke before them; as had Du Bois before Locke. From 'An American Dilemma' sprang an 'enlightenment of delay.' Both/And might be the answer: 'the Classics and the Folk.' To Sterling an integer was his whole number.

Juneteenth 2006.

--Michael S. Harper's most recent books of poetry include Selected Poems (ARC Publications, 2002) and Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems (2000); Honorable Amendments (1995). Send letters to