The Ballad of Rudolph Reed

Gwendolyn Brooks was a child during the Harlem Renaissance and published her first poem just as it was ending. By the late 1920s and the Great Depression of the 1930s, Black writers were less sanguine about art’s ability to improve the fortunes of Black people in the United States. Black people watched as race riots, the Great Depression, and the creep of Cold War paranoia during the 1940s and 1950s eroded the gains they had made during the 1920s in Black neighborhoods like Harlem. During the 1940s, when Brooks would have been working more seriously on her craft, writers such as Richard Wright and Anne Petry described cities that had once seemed like the promised land as traps where lack of economic opportunity, few job options, and poor housing crushed Black dreams, and art was the only relief.

Brooks lived in Chicago, and A Street in Bronzeville, Brooks’s first poetry collection, is also set in Chicago. Brooks notes that during the time she wrote the poems that “[i]f you wanted a poem, you only had to look out of a window. There was material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing” (Brooks, Gwendolyn. “A Report from A Report From Part One.” Ebony Magazine, 1973, p. 117). The speakers and voices in Brooks’s poems during this period tend to belong to working-class Black characters.

Although the word choices make the poems accessible, Brooks was then just as likely to use a sonnet as free verse in structuring her poems. Brooks argues in 1950 that presenting “raw materials” as poetry isn’t enough, no matter how important the subject, and that the Black poet’s “most urgent duty, at present, is to polish his technique, his way of presenting his truths and his beauties, that these may be more insinuating, and, therefore, more overwhelming” (Brooks, Gwendolyn. “Poets Who Are Negroes.” Phylon, 1950, p. 312). Ordinary experiences and people might inspire poems, but they should display the poet’s craft and mastery of form.

Brooks published The Bean Eaters, the collection in which “The Ballad of Rudolph Reed” first appears, in 1960. The poem is a perfect illustration of Brooks as a transitional figure between the poets of previous generations and those associated with the Black Arts. The subject matter—a Black man killing white people for abusing his family—is a testament to the dangers racism poses to Black people going about their own business. Brooks presents Reed’s choice to kill white people who abuse his family as tragic, while the stoic response of his wife and wounded child is both tragic and heroic. Her focus on home, family, and being willing to endure or die for the sake of freedom fits well alongside poetry of the Black Arts.

On the other hand, Brooks relies on the form of the ballad—four-line stanzas with regular line and meter—to contain the explosive, violent story of Rudolph Reed. That emphasis on old forms like the ballad or sonnet was the difference between Brooks and the insurgent Black writers of the later 1960s. When Brooks attended the Black Writers Conference at Fisk University in 1967, she was shocked to discover that she was “one of the coldly Respected old Has-beens” (Brooks, Gwendolyn. “A Report from A Report From Part One,” p. 119) and that the formal nature of her work and restrained tone accounted for shifts in how younger Black writers saw her. Her subsequent collections, including In the Mecca (1968), continue to focus on the experiences of ordinary Black people, but the work is more experimental in form and more militant in tone.