Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks poem, “Of De Witt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery” is a very undetailed but good poem. It’s a story of a dead boy on his way to the cemetery. She calls this boy, “nothing but a plain black boy,” whether she really felt he was insignificant or if she was sad and showing that others didn’t really care about him or his death. She also says that he is, “blind within his casket, but maybe he will know,” I think she’s saying he is dead and obviously cannot see out of the casket but maybe he will know because he is watching from somewhere else, whether she believes that is heaven or not. She talked of the places he loved to go and the things he loved to do, now we could take this two different ways as well, 1: She’s showing that he is a real person and that people should care about his death or 2: He is just like everyone else, average. He’s just a plain black boy. I’d like to think that giving more detail into his life was her way of showing that this was a real person who loved to do things just like everyone else, but he is now gone, and it is sad.

Brooks other poem, “The Boy Died in My Alley” is much more detailed and conversational than her last. This is a poem about how a boy came to die in the alley behind someone’s home. Whether or not this is supposed to connect with the first poem, I don’t know. I think it’d be great if they did. First, we learn about a “plain black boy” that sounds like no one cared much, then we see how the boy died and all the hardships that he had endured during his time. It starts with the police telling the person the boy had died and asking if they had anything to do with it or if they had seen anything. The person says they knew the boy but not by their face, they heard him a lot but also heard his pain. It sounds like this person is almost blaming themselves for the murder of this boy. Like if they had stepped in to help the boy things would’ve turned out differently.

The differences between these two poems are huge. She grew in her writing so much after the Second Black Writers’ Conference. Before the conference we see a story where she and no one else seems to care for this boy who had died and was never to be seen again. In the second story we see someone mourn for the dead boy and wishing they could’ve fixed things. They are sorry that the boy is gone, unlike the first story. They heard his cries and did nothing for him. They show the hardships this boy had endured and that no one was there for him. As he yelled for his father, mother, brother, and sister, no one came… I think she now was catering to her black community by showing the suffering and sadness from a black boy’s death, even though she never specifically says he was a black boy.