Brooks’ Attentive Black Ecology in ‘Maud Martha’
“Maud Martha was fighting with a chicken,” Gwendolyn Brooks begins chapter 28 of her novella Maud Martha, a chapter ironically titled “Brotherly Love.” By the end of the vignette, however, Maud’s attention has turned from the chicken as her nemesis to the chicken as a “sort of person” (Brooks 153), to whom she begins to relate, and what initially seems like a misnomer become epiphanic—in the quotidian, domestic task of food prepping, where the mind is free to wander, Maud begins to reconsider different ways of being in relation to the chicken that she is processing. She is fighting with the process, the relation, not the chicken.
Brooks attention to the quotidian, the community member, and to the animal is well-documented. Poet and scholar Joshua Bennett attests to this in Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man, in which he is thinking about “the ways in which animal life operates as a site of recognition and reckoning for African American authors in the twentieth century and beyond” (6). He cites Brooks as one of the “theorists” to look to for “how we should read bestial presence in African American letters” (Bennett 6). How can we read the presence of the chicken in this scene of Maud Martha? How does the chicken act as “a site of recognition and reckoning?” What does it help us recognize? What does it help Maud to recognize and reckon with? If the chapter title is of any indication, it points us toward the recognition of a different kind of relation with the chicken, a brotherly relation of solidarity, a family dynamic.
Brooks’ use of brotherly in the chapter’s title points to some important assumptions in the language and how it belies historical constructions at the intersection of race and gender—the male gender stands in metonymically for such concepts as “human being” and “person.” Brotherly love is intended to mean not just love between men but love between fellow humans (see: “mankind”) where, originally, only men—white, property-owning men in particular—were thought to be human persons. In Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life, Sarah Jane Cervenak cites the historical construction of these categories as occurring within the epistemes of Enlightenment philosophy, which coincided with Western colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade. In particular, she looks at Locke’s theories of liberal humanism, which argue that the earth has been given to Man by God, and which make ownership of land, labor, and the self, a requirement for personhood (Cervenak 4-8). While Cervenak cites Locke, Bennett argues that
the vision of personhood offered by various writers in the Black aesthetic tradition represents a response to both a Hegelian account of personhood, in which “the person has for its substantive end the right of placing its will in any and everything,” and to a variant of personhood established and enforced by contemporary jurisprudence, in which “not every human being is necessarily a person, for a person is capable of rights and duties, and there may well be human beings having no legal rights, as was the case with slaves in English law. . . . A person is not such because he is human, but because rights and duties are ascribed to him” (12)
Defining the human and personhood, for legal and land-owning reasons, brought some beings under these labels but, importantly, it also left some beings out. This construction circumscribed those beings who were nonhuman nonpersons (a chicken) and human nonpersons (enslaved Africans), not worthy of—or for whom it was not necessary to show—affection, consideration, or deeper attention. In this way, Brooks’ chicken is a site of reckoning with what and who we consider to be human or a person worthy of our attention and care, as well as how our relationships to those we consider to be outside of the categories of humankind or personhood, in our society, necessarily include violence.
It is through the psyche of a Black woman in 1950s America that we are afforded this reckoning and made to recognize the personhood of the chicken. Perhaps the mind of a Black woman is the site that makes such reckoning and recognition possible because Maud, and the author of her story, have lived an experience in America in which their personhood has not been fully recognized. One reason we are able to experience this scene is because, as a woman, Maud is relegated to the domestic sphere, where we find her attempting to butcher this chicken, an act for which “(she) thought she had praise coming to her” (Brooks 152). This is the pinnacle of glory for Maud—that she must do a good job laboring over this chicken, that she “be as brave as she could” (152). Even though Maud is a Black woman in 1950s America, where, presumably, Black people are free, her personhood and even her humanity are still in question, not just by white people but by her Black husband Paul as well. Cervenak writes that “even after emancipation . . . American self-possession centrally moves as the capacity of whiteness to keep Blackness held,” and that “(such) figuration of Black freedom as propertied self-possession, moreover, depended on a continued anti-Black and anti-earth figuration of gathering” (6). Even in the 1950s, where African Americans are, de jure “free,” they still are not self-possessed, especially not Black women, who are relegated to the domestic spheres of homes—their own and others—property that their husbands are able to rent or own, and therefore legally possess in a move toward settler-colonial notions of human personhood.
In her article, “An Order of Constancy: Notes on Brooks and the Feminine,” Hortense Spillers examines the existential peculiarity of Black women via Maud Martha. “In contrast to her husband Paul Phillips, who occupies and rents space in the world, without an angle on it, or a critique of it,” Spillers writes, Maud Martha and “her talents are constrained by what we would now consider four narrow walls that provide her with neither a room of her own, nor the time to miss it” (230-231). While Maud owns not the time or space to think through, her husband Paul—who does possess the space—doesn’t possess any thought about it. He doesn’t have a critique for it, or an angle on it, Spillers observes. Maud, in whose psyche we find ourselves, is therefore constrained to thinking, critiquing, angling on her circumstances, her confinement, and that of others who lack self-possession like her, while working in the domestic sphere, the “arena of choices that transport us to the heart of dailiness, of the mundane and the unglamorous” (Spillers 230). It is in the multi-tasking mind of Maud that Brooks finds the stage on which to consider alternative forms of personhood and to demonstrate brotherly love—affection, care, consideration, attention—as an alternative way to be in relation to those traditionally circumscribed as nonpersons under Western colonial epistemes.
As she is butchering the chicken, Maud’s thoughts drift from disgust with the process, to the contemporary war moment and its effect on the availability of poultry, then back to disgust—a disgust that ultimately leads to her examination of the violent distinction between people and chickens. “People could do this!” Maud thinks, “people could cut a chicken open, take out the mess, with bare hands or a bread knife, pour water in, as in a bag, pour water out, shake the corpse. . .” (Brooks 152). On its face, the initial exclamation feels like an internal rallying cry for Maud, as in: Other people can do this, so I should be able to! However, as she launches into a description of the “this,” the reader realizes she is performing each task as she anxiously names it, and each description marks the distance between the people doing the “this” and the chicken that they are doing the “this” to—“this” being taking out the chicken’s insides, “the mess,” butchering the chicken. It’s easy to do it to a chicken, one could even use a bread knife—perhaps the most unwieldy slaughter tool available for the job, Maud’s tool of choice. In the task of butchering, the chicken’s body is treated like a mere “bag,” Maud observes. One isn’t shaking a chicken; one is shaking a “corpse.” What initially sounds like an exasperated, people could do this! I can’t believe people can do this! I have to do this? Yuck! begins to grow a faint “sure” at the beginning and becomes, Sure, people could do this! People could do this to a mere chicken. . .
As Maud goes on, the description of the task-at-hand gets more murderous, and the adjectives more curious: people “(could) feel that insinuating slipping bone, survey that soft, that headless death. The fainthearted could do it” (Brooks 152). The double-gerund indicating the imminent, nigh, but not-yet, ongoing ongoing task of liberating the bone from the sinew, the end each time “slipping” away. And what is meant by insinuating? How can a “slipping bone” be insinuating? The verb insinuate means “to introduce tortuously, sinuously, indirectly, or by devious methods; to introduce by imperceptible degrees or subtle means” (OED). Brook’s precision of word choice here brings Maud’s determined frustration and elbow grease through loudly. Separating bone from sinew is indeed a tortuous, slippery, elusive task—especially when all one has is a big bread knife to do it with—it is a task one accomplishes degree by imperceptible degree, and we can see Maud laboring over the task. Also of note, is “that headless death,” where “death” isn’t a verb, but a noun standing in for the body of the chicken, a body that is no longer even a chicken but a mere “corpse”—the death, which is to say the dead body, is “headless.”
Brooks choice to italicize the first half of the compound word “fainthearted” is what confirms the incoming presence of a “but.” The butchering of a chicken? “People could do this!” Even the “fainthearted could do it” (152). The emphasis on “faint” communicates how mere of a task this is—not much bravery or courage is needed to butcher a chicken. But (the “but” sounds in response to the faint’s call). “But if the chicken were a man!” Maud thinks, that would be another story, and it has been another story since the onset of “a fictionalized, white Enlightenment narrative of the earth’s beginning,” and its “imposition of anti-earth and anti-Black narratives of the earth and Black people as given over to propertied regulation and inscription” (Cervenak 4, 7). The subtle implication seems to be: Chickens? Black folks? Why even the fainthearted could handle their deaths, could do whatever they wanted to them, but humans, people, men were a different story. What Brook does next, in this vignette, indicates an awareness of the “insinuating, slipping” circumscriptions of “man,” “human,” and “person.”
Once Maud entertains the thought of someone doing to a “man” what she is doing to the chicken, the denotative boundaries of the bodies at play begin to dissolve. “But if the chicken were a man!—cold man with no head or feet,” Maud Martha dares to think, and as the description begins one thinks she is setting out to describe a man, but the word “cold” immediately makes things strange. Why would a man be “cold”? Why would he have “no head or feet”? Maud is putting the man in the position—better yet, in the body—of a butchered chicken. She goes on: “with all the little feath—er, hairs to be pulled, and the intestines loosened and beginning to ooze out, and the gizzard yet to be grabbed and the stench beginning to rise!” (Brooks 152-3). Here, the description stops abruptly, as if Maud Martha can’t bear to continue thinking about it, as if to say, that would be a task that the faint of heart could not pull off. . . so why is it any different with this chicken? This is the consideration Maud’s thoughts have led us to. “And yet the chicken was a sort of person,” she concludes, “a respectable individual, with its own kind of dignity” (Brooks 153). Not a “human,” but a person. The chicken might not be a “human” person, but it was a person, an individual, respectable, with dignity—these are the qualities that Maud associates with personhood, and with which she herself wishes to be associated, as a Black woman doing her duty, in her humble, rented kitchenette.
If the chicken is a respectable individual, a person with dignity, then what distinguishes the chicken from a man, which is to say a human? What makes the chicken’s slaughter such an acceptable, mundane task, but the slaughter of a man a thought that Maud can’t bring herself to finish? “The difference was in the knowing,” Maud assesses, “What was unreal to you, you could deal with violently. If chickens were ever to be safe, people would have to live with them, and know them, see them loving their children, finishing the evening meal, arranging jealousy” (Brooks 153). According to Maud, to be known is what saves you from humans and human violence. Importantly, she connects being known to being real. If something is real, which is to say if something is a real human, one cannot deal with it violently. To be known is to be a real human. Therefore, Maud argues, “people” would have to witness chickens doing human things—loving, eating dinner together, possessing emotions—in order for their live and, in turn, their deaths to be significant.
To know the nonhuman person or human nonperson is the invitation that Brooks extends through Maud Martha in this moment. Knowing as an important kind of attention one might afford another, a witness to one’s life and the value of that life. This moment of consideration feels important to my own project, tentatively titled The Black Outside, in which I am thinking around a poetics of Black ecologies—that is Black writers’ (including my own) constructive and imaginative responses to a world of violent settler-colonial relations with the earth, its flora and fauna and other nonhumans/nonpersons. I see here, from Maud, a reconsideration of how to be differently in relation to those which are considered nonhumans/nonpersons, and the implications that has on her life as a Black woman, the kind of consideration or knowing that she hopes to receive, where knowing is a kind of elevated attention that one might consider a Black ecological response. “She be knowing,” as Black folks might say.
In writing about Black authors of the twentieth century and beyond, Bennett identifies a Black ecological vision. He finds “a vision of human personhood rooted not in ownership but rather in the desire for recognition and care” (Bennett 5). “What these authors appear to be seeking, alongside the space to be properly grieved,” Bennett writes, “is a vision that is profoundly ecological, one that takes place in a social field made up of dynamic relationships not predicated solely on domination or exploitation” but on “admiring attention, reciprocity, contemplation, and respect: where knowledge would no longer imply property” (7-8, emphasis my own). That Gwendolyn Brooks is one of these authors is made clear in this chapter of Maud Martha. She presents a version of attention that reveals a new way of being in relation to that which is considered to be nonhuman or nonperson, and in doing so she offers us a fuller way of being.
Works Cited
Bennett, Joshua. Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man. Harvard UP, 2020.
Brooks, Gwendolyn. Maud Martha. Third World Press, 1992.
Cervenak, Sarah Jane. Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life. Duke UP, 2021.
Spillers, Hortense. “An Order of Constancy: Notes on Brooks and the Feminine.” The Centennial
Review, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Spring 1985), pp. 223-248.