When the World Ends, It Will Begin in New York
Letter to Maud Martha
What she wanted was to donate to the world a good Maud Martha. That was the offering, the bit of art, that could not come from any other. She would polish and hone that.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha
Maudie baby, most days I long for completion,
which usually looks like your lips
in the rising dusk of evening in the muffled
and muzzled whispers of my solitude. I thought
this was the city to fall in love in
with its shifting boroughs and palette
of dry-eyed and loose-mouthed women
and men, so unlike Chicago keeping
them tightly boxed in clustered nests.
I thought I would wander down 125th
and hear Langston’s Harlem calling
for me, somewhere: the ringing of
the Cotton Club; the rebellion of
zoot suiters; and exhorters
standing on corners, preaching
of a new world, which is usually
the same world before they became
destroyers. Now, there are men here
selling oils to massage my scalp: Natural elixirs
from the motherland to nulify the pangs and angsts
of America and being American. If
I’m not American or living
in what I though was America, tell me,
where and whom am I to be? But
these days “somewhere” is where
I usually am. In the fold of Chicago’s winters,
do you think of me, a warm thought
to bundle up the emptiness you feel? Summer here is alright,
but there are cracks in the sun and it rains, dampening
the wake of morning and glazing everything
in sooty tears, the way you cry at a Sunday choir’s
singing of “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.”
Do you still think of me in my youth
when I was full on fullness, sweet toothed
and salivating over bitter women? Understand I wanted
to be a man by learning from my mother
who struggled to be a woman, but manliness
is a weight I don’t think I’ve carried yet. I too
wish to donate to the world a good Cheswayo,
but I don’t know what I’m becoming. I hope
it is someone who will know how to mend
the edges in the stride of your spine
and wherever else you wish my hands
would press and release your loneliness
when the world is lifting you up, but gravity
weakens your faith; Chicago is a decent place
to fall in love.
Header shot by University of Minnesota Library, The Givens Collection of African American
Literature: The Arts of Social Justice.Maud Martha: A Novel, by Gwendolyn Brooks. New York: Harper, 1953