The Bean Eaters

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The Bean Eaters

Gwendolyn Brooks 1960

The title poem of Gwendolyn Brooks’s third volume of poetry, published in 1960, is “The Bean Eaters.” This was her first publication of poetry after becoming the first African American writer to receive the Pulitzer Prize, which she won eleven years earlier in 1949 for Annie Allen. Although the volume, and the poem, are thought to show signs of personal and political transformation for Brooks, they are still considered part of her earlier work which addresses issues of life, death, poverty, and racism. Critics claimed their general approach to these themes made the poems more universal, but Brooks slowly began to feel they were avoiding the heart of the matter at hand. It is apparent in “The Bean Eaters” that Brooks is writing about the difficult experience of poverty, but hasn’t moved beyond the formal constraints and distant tone of her earlier work. The poem is a description of a couple and their simple act of eating beans. It slowly presents the monotonous routine of the couple’s life together while giving particular details of their experience. The couple seem at first to be unaffected by their plight; eventually it is revealed that they are all the while “remembering, with twinklings and twinges.” It is left open what it is exactly that they are remembering, but the poem implies that it is their lives which have past them by. After introducing this sad and tragic possibility, “The Bean Eaters” ends with a seemingly random list of the things the two have accumulated and that surround them as they take their meal of beans.

Author Biography

Combining a commitment to racial identity and equality with a mastery of poetic techniques, Brooks has bridged the gap between the academic poets of her generation in the 1940s and the young militant writers of the 1960s. Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917, but raised in Chicago, Brooks started writing poetry as a child. She was inspired by her parents, Keziah Wims Brooks, a schoolteacher, and David Anderson Brooks, a janitor who had failed to achieve his dream of becoming a doctor because of insufficient funds for tuition. By the late 1930s Brooks had published some seventy-five poems and had been encouraged in her efforts by Langston Hughes. Following graduation from Wilson Junior College in 1936, she worked briefly as a maid and then as a secretary to Dr. E. N. French, a “spiritual advisor” who sold potions and charms out of a Chicago tenement building known as the Mecca. In 1938 Brooks joined the NAACP Youth Council, where she met Henry Lowington Blakely II. The two were married the following year and in 1940 saw the birth of their son, Henry Lowington Blakely III.

In 1941 Brooks attended poetry workshops at Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center, producing poems which would appear in her first published volume, A Street in Bronzeville (1945). This work was a poetic description of the everyday lives of the black people who occupied a large section of Chicago called “Bronzeville.” Its themes would feature prominently in Brooks’s works during the next two decades: family life, war, the quest for contentment and honor, and the hardships caused by racism and poverty. Annie Allen (1949), her next book of poems, continued the movement of Brooks’s poetry toward social issues. The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950, the first time that the award had been presented to a black honoree. Brooks’s daughter Nora was born the next year and in 1953 the author published Maud Martha, a novel.

Over the next several years, Brooks produced a book of poetry for children and worked on a novel which she later abandoned (although the first chapter was published as both a story and a poem). Her next major collection, The Bean Eaters (1960), details the attempts of ghetto inhabitants to escape feelings of hopelessness. The importance of the volume derives from Brooks’s continued mastery of poetic forms and her movement away from autobiographical tensions and toward social concerns. Brooks’s popularity and national visibility increased

in the 1960s—in 1962 President John F. Kennedy invited her to read at a Library of Congress poetry festival. New pieces in Selected Poems (1963) reveal the author’s growing interest in the civil rights movement; among the new poems was a salute to the Freedom Riders of 1961.

Brooks experienced a change in political consciousness and artistic direction after observing the combative spirit of several young black authors at the Second Black Writers’ Conference at Fisk University in 1967. This inspiration helped inform the volume In the Mecca (1968), in which Brooks abandoned traditional poetic forms in favor of free verse and increased her use of vernacular to make her works more accessible. In Riot (1969) and Family Pictures (1970) Brooks evoked the revolutionary legacy of such slain black activists as Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and examined the social upheavals of the late 1960s. And in the nonfiction book A Capsule Course in Black Poetry Writing (1975) Brooks advised beginning poets.

The 1980s continued to bring Brooks honors and awards—in 1980, she read her works at the White House with Robert Hayden, Stanley Kunitz, and eighteen other distinguished poets. Now holding over forty honorary doctorates and having served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1985 to 1986, Brooks continues to read her works throughout the United States.

Poem Text

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.

And remembering ...
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back
      room that is full of beads
   and receipts and dolls and clothes, tobacco
      crumbs, vases and fringes.

Poem Summary

Line 1

The beginning of “The Bean Eaters” works simply to establish the subject and tone of what is to follow. In one short line we discover that it is an aged couple the speaker is describing. The use of the adjective yellow seems particularly interesting in that it doesn’t clearly denote racial origins as so often colors describing people are intended to do. Instead it seems to merely represent the two as old, in the same way paper turns as it ages. It could allude to sickness, jaundice, as we don’t normally think of yellow skin as a sign of health. The line also establishes the subject we expect from the title: a meal of beans. It becomes clear that this event is intended to convey poverty, as the word “mostly” prevents a reader from thinking this is a one-time event.

Lines 2-4

Here we get the first end-rhyme of the poem, although it is the only time the first and second lines of any stanza will do so. This could be a gesture by Brooks to help a reader into the poem, with a swing or rhythm which propels one right in. The poem continues to add context to the event of eating through the words “casual” and “plain,” reinforcing the idea of the couple living simply and in possible poverty. The rhymes continue in line 3 with “chipware” echoing the “pair” and “affair” of

Media Adaptations

An audio cassette titled “Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Clifton” was released in 1993 through The American Academy of Poets Tape Program.
A sound recording of Gwendolyn Brooks Reading Her Poetry, with an Introduction by Don L. Lee, is available from Caedmon.

lines 1 and 2 respectively. Then there is another end-rhyme, in the simple fourth line: “Tin flatware.” Again notice the detail of “tin” adding to the established atmosphere of poverty.

Despite the lack of a set meter in the opening stanza, there is a definite music to the language. They way lines 2 and 4 are shorter than lines 1 and 3, and the way line 3 uses repetition to distinguish itself and provide accents in addition to the stresses that end each line, are both excellent examples of how rhythm and musicality can be achieved without a planned cadence.

Lines 5-6

“The Bean Eaters” continues its second stanza by offering a judgment on the couple, saying that they are “Mostly Good.” It is interesting to note Brooks’s decision to not overstate the goodness of the people, idealizing them in some way. Instead, she uses the modifier “mostly.” Notice how this word efficiently softens the claim of the couple’s goodness while at the same time connecting the second stanza with the first, where “mostly” was first used. The rhythms and connections continue with line 6 as it uses anaphora to link it with line 5. This line goes on to verify the feeling of somberness in the poem by explaining that the couple are no longer fully active or engaged with their lives. Their having “lived their day” could even be taken more harshly to mean that they are no longer really living at all, but are simply waiting for their everyday routine to end.

Lines 7-8

The rudimentary nature of the couple’s living is described in further detail as Brooks employs repetition again to link lines. The rhythm of “putting on their clothes” and “putting things away” continues the musical cadence already established and also gives the impression of a certain monotony in the daily lives of the two. Note the use of the word “their,” which could be taken to imply that the two have been together for so long that they have become one entity. There exists some small hope in the ability of the two to endure; it could be argued that “But keep on” reveals an element of survival, even in the midst of “putting things away.”

Lines 9-10

The poem seems to ready itself for some revelation or insight. The short, two-word line, the introduction of the act of remembering, and the ellipses, which causes the line to trail off and pause, can be seen as working together to reveal the bittersweet reality of the couple. It is the act of remembering that seems to be the couple’s real activity. The speaker hints at the bittersweet nature of the memories by mentioning the “twinklings and twinges” that accompany them. Notice how Brooks again uses repetition to provide rhythm and emphasis to the idea of remembering that is so essential to the poem. She also continues the musical flow with the use of alliteration, the repeating of the “t” sound.

Lines 11-12

Whatever hope or joyful memories the couple might have seem insignificant in the presence of the final two lines of the poem. The couple “lean over” with what might be fatigue. They are in a “rented back room” full of what we assume to be objects collected and put away over the years, and in this setting they seem to have almost nothing. Notice that they do not own the place where they live and eat, but only rent. And very important is the fact that the event of eating a meal—often in literature a symbol of health and even holiness—is reduced here to an experience of personal scarcity in the back of the house amidst material clutter.

It could be argued that there is some hope in that the two people are together; that they are eating at all might carry an implication of holiness. Brooks does choose to keep the poem lively in its tempo and rhythm, and even ends the poem with what could be considered a decorative word, rhyming “fringes” with “twinges.” This provides a good example of how a poem can balance itself by having the form—the rhythm and movement of the language—counteract content or subject matter. It is possible that Brooks chose to keep the poem from becoming too morose and sad by crafting a movement and musical language which can be seen as life affirming.

Themes

Memory and Reminiscence

The force of this poem comes from making the reader feel sympathy for the old couple and their attachment to their past. Their current life is shown to be unpleasant and shabby, as evidenced by the plain chipped dinnerware, creaking wood, tin flatware, the rented back room, and, of course, the beans they eat for cheap, inelegant sustenance. To accept the indignity of their circumstances, it only makes sense for the reader to look at the splendor of their past life. But where is the splendor? Brooks does not contrast the couple’s current downtrodden circumstances with beauty and elegance, as we might expect, but with commonplace, mundane articles, including in the short space she allows for this list such disposables as “receipts” and “tobacco crumbs.” After Brooks devotes so much of the poem to the couple’s current lives, the reader expects to hear of their memories too—especially after the line “Remembering, with twinklings and twinges.” Brooks, wisely, does not directly show us the memories, but they are presented with more force in this poem by their absence, because we only see their causes and effects. The effects are that they make the old couple feel comfortable with their current state. Their memories are caused by little, simple things, too personal for anyone but themselves to appreciate. Beads, for example, are not inherently wonderful, but the reader believes they are so because of the wonderful effect they have on the old couple. The items are lenses for looking into the past: we can see the lens, we can see them looking through it, but we cannot see what they see. If we could see the memories that these old people cherish, we might be unimpressed, but the important thing here is their opinion.

Pride

Despite the poverty of the old couple in “The Bean Eaters,” readers sense a feeling of pride about them. Brooks hints that they might once have been members of a higher social class in the second line,

Topics for Further Study

Write a poem that shows its reader the life of an old couple that has been together for a long time. Include a list of items in their home that help identify who they are.
Though unglamorous, beans have been an inexpensive form of nutrition in every culture. Pick one culture throughout history, preferably your own, and research the history of beans in that culture’s cooking. Try to find the earliest examples of using beans, back to studies of primitive times.
Explain what each of the items listed in the poem’s last two lines tells you about the old couple’s life together.

with the phrase “Dinner is a casual affair.” Not only is this a comic understatement of their circumstances, but calling a meal of beans off of broken dishes with cheap flatware “casual” tells that this couple is used to being polite and having social grace. Regardless of what a reader might think of their situation, they still have dignity and a sense of honor. Brooks raises doubts about whether their self-esteem is justified in the fifth line, with the qualifier “mostly”: on the one hand, she may be indicating that these people deserve respect and attention even though they are not saintly and are, in fact, less than perfect, but a more troubling interpretation is that they are being pretentious by acting so dignified without being as good as they can be. According to this interpretation, the objects in the back room that are the source of their pride are cheap substitutes for truly worthy items (dolls instead of children, vases instead of flowers, receipts instead of merchandise, etc.). Another clue that they are over-estimating their place in the world, or “putting on airs,” is the description of the old pair as “yellow.” If they were presented metaphorically by paper, this would be a sign of age; if the poem were written in slang, the implication might be that the couple is cowardly; even more inconsistent with the tone of the poem would be to associate this word with a vulgar term for Orientals. In the narrow scope of African-American slang, the dialect that Brooks grew up with and moved among, “yellow” is used to describe someone who is light-skinned, sometimes a source of prestige, especially when it allows them to go beyond their oppressed community and “pass” as white. There is no other evidence in the poem that these people are African American, but this interpretation is consistent with the idea that they have an elevated sense of prestige.

Alienation

Throughout the twentieth century, literature, and especially American literature, has consistently become more concerned with individuals being alienated from society at large. People feel less involved with those around them, and they are more inclined to feel different and feel as if they do not belong. The root of this situation was the integration patterns that have redefined American cities. The late 1800s and early 1900s brought a record number of immigrants to the United States from Europe, and the levels of those arriving remained high throughout the two World Wars, as those who escaped ravaged Europe came to make use of the stronger economy. Added to this was a great population shift away from the country, as manufacturing replaced agriculture as the economy’s driving force. In the city, people found themselves in close physical proximity to others, but those others were strangers. To protect themselves from the higher concentration of criminals who would prey upon them, people learned a self-imposed aloofness. Another cause for alienation has been the growth of mass media. With telephone, movies, radio, and then television, people could keep entertained with no other people around. The couple in “The Bean Eaters” shows no sign of involvement with anybody outside of their home. Replacing other people is the attention they lavish on simple daily actions (“putting on clothes / And putting things away”) and the objects from their past that remind them of better times. Brooks offers no explanation for their isolation, whether it is inflicted on them or is self-imposed, but the poem’s popularity in the forty years since it was written is proof that it captures a circumstance that is widely recognized.

Style

The form of “The Bean Eaters” is representative of the transitionary timing of Brooks’s writing. It maintains a certain rhyme scheme, but not one that is rigid and extensive in its structure. The poem is constructed of three stanzas of four lines each. The second and fourth line of each stanza have end-rhymes. The consistent size of stanzas and this simple rhyme scheme are the two gestures the poem makes toward traditional form. There is no particular meter, as Brooks chose to allow herself the flowing possibilities of free verse. The poem takes full advantage of the free verse in the final stanza where the lines extend themselves the full width of the page in a running list of the room’s contents. Brooks may have wanted the final two lines—given that they are memories being listed—to more adequately represent the nature of our remembering, which is often random and reaching.

Eventually Brooks would abandon traditional forms of poetry for a free verse that allowed her to more accurately reflect the speech and experience of Black culture in America. However, that change did not occur until the late 1960s and the publication of In the Mecca.

Historical Context

The idea of old people who have descended from their previous days of glory into poverty and isolation was in no way new or unique at the time when “The Bean Eaters,” was written, but there are aspects to the modern world that make the plight of this poem’s couple particularly disturbing. Brooks wrote this poem at the end of the 1950s. To many, this decade, especially the period of eight years that contained the presidential administration of Dwight Eisenhower, is remembered as being a time of bland harmony. When popular culture looks back on the 1950s it shows us a time of prosperity and innocence that was ignorant of the explosive, independence-minded “freedom culture” that was to emerge in the 1960s. To some extent, the 1950s were a socially peaceful time. On the other hand, the 1950s brought about unprecedented forward motion in the cause of civil rights, as local laws that had been used to keep blacks out of white social institutions were opposed by the federal government, and in turn the federal government was opposed by the supporters of segregation. Brooks refers to the old couple as “yellow,” a slang term in the black community, dating to the 1800s, referring to a black with pale skin, who sometimes “passes” as white. In this poem, a tension exists between the calm passivity of the old people and the suppressed outrage that it disguises.

Although slavery had been abolished for nearly a hundred years, various laws had been enacted, particularly in the southern states, that made it impossible for African Americans to achieve equal social footing with whites. Late in the nineteenth century, a number of laws referred to as “Jim Crow” laws (after a silly, childlike Negro in an 1832 minstrel show) made it illegal for blacks and whites to ride the same trains, eat in the same restaurants, swim at the same beaches, and so on. These laws were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, most memorably in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896, when the court ruled that it was not the federal government’s place to overrule states’segregationist laws, as long as black facilities were “equal.” In practice, the facilities provided to blacks were seldom very equal, since businessmen had no motivation to duplicate their best offerings for society’s poorest members. In the mid-1950s, African-American resistance to the “separate but equal” doctrine began to have results. In December of 1955, after a secretary named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, the city’s African Americans boycotted the transit system for a year, eventually winning integration and elevating local minister Martin Luther King, Jr. to international attention. In 1953 Plessy vs. Ferguson was overturned by a new Supreme Court ruling, Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which recognized that “’separate but equal’ facilities are inherently unequal.” In another historic case, the President had to send army troops to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect nine blacks who were entering the school because the state’s governor, Orval Faubus, tried using national guard troops to keep them out. Among the reasons why integration was finally able to achieve these gains were the hard work and peaceful protest methods of black organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Council, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Congress of Racial Equality. Peaceful organized protests had been held before, but in the 1950s television sets became common in most American households, and people could see for themselves the passivity of the protesters and the violence that was being used against them.

Television ownership grew by five million sets per year between 1950 and 1958, until the skyrocketing sales tapered off when they were in 88 percent of American homes. To some degree, this created a form of segregation in itself: as borders

Compare & Contrast

1960: A filibuster in the Senate went around the clock from February 29 to March 5, with southern Senators delaying a vote on a civil rights act that would authorize federal referees to watch polling places where blacks had been discriminated against.
1964: The Civil Rights Act of 1964, legislation started by president John F. Kennedy’s administration and carried through after his death, makes discrimination according to race a federal offense.
1975: The President’s Commission on Civil Rights issued a report that southern schools were more integrated than northern ones.
1982: The Equal Rights Amendment, intended to make discrimination due to gender illegal, failed to gain enough votes after ten years.
Today: Most laws that allow racism and sexism have been rewritten, but society still struggles with how to recognize differences without showing favoritism.
1960: 22 percent of all U.S. residents lived below the poverty level.
1970: 12.6 percent of U.S. residents lived below the poverty level.
1980: 13.0 percent of all U.S. residents lived below the poverty level.

between races were being broken down, walls were going up between one household and the next. Publicly shared forms of entertainment were still around and are around today, but with television’s rise, it became less important to go out and be with people for a good time and more important to stay home. As a result, a new social phenomenon of disinvolvement developed. Americans began to see each other less and lose track of the people who lived nearby.

Critical Overview

By the time “The Bean Eaters” was published Gwendolyn Brooks had already received the Pulitzer Prize. To many critics, “The Bean Eaters” did serve to show an “increased social awareness.” Brooks’s work preceding 1960 was hailed by critics as universally appealing in its general approach to such explosive issues as racism and poverty. A Street in Bronzeville, Brooks’s first book of poems (published in 1945), was described in 1982 by George Kent as Brooks’s “first compassionate outreach to the broad range of humanity.” Eventually she would become more direct in her struggle to express the black experience in America, and her “reawakened and redirected artistic consciousness [would] reflect the black cultural milieu.” She would never abandon her interest in exploring the universal elements of human being, however, even with her renewed focus—“The Bean Eaters” serves as an excellent example of Brooks’s strength in this pursuit.

Criticism

Mort Rich

Mort Rich is a professor teaching at Montclair State University, and a writer of poetry, as well as articles about poetry, critical thinking, and autobiography. In the following essay, Rich analyzes “The Bean Eaters “in terms of Brooks’s own seemingly contradictory statements that poetry should have the looseness of “human talk” and that it should employ only as many words as necessary.

Complexity in Plain Language: “The Bean Eaters,” by Gwendolyn Brooks

When Brooks wrote “a few hints” to younger writers about creating what she called “Black Poetry Writing,” she suggested using “ordinary speech.” Yet she also wrote, “Try telling the reader a little less ... in a poem every word must work ... not one word or piece of punctuation should be used which does not strengthen the poem.” She reinforces this apparent contradiction in her ideas by writing, “loosen your rhythm so that it sounds like human talk. Human talk is not exact, is not precise. You must make your reader believe that what you say could be true.” Brooks thus provides inconsistent or even contradictory criteria that may be used for examining her own poetry. What happens when these criteria are applied to “The Bean Eaters?”

Does the language of the poem read like inexact “human talk,” or ordinary speech? Take, for instance, the lines “They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair. / Dinner is a casual affair.” The words are those of everyday language, but not so common is their order of presentation, which provides intensification through syntactic reversals of ordinary speech. A speaker might say, “This old yellow pair eats mostly beans,” or, even closer to real speech, “this old couple.” “Old yellow pair” resonates with connotations that are absent from “old couple.” “Yellow,” in the context of skin color, suggests faded, old, or the results of racial intermarriage; and “pair,” more sympathetic than “couple,” suggests connection—a mating for life. Thus, the first line sets a tone of affection and establishes the compassionate attitude of the speaker toward her subject. The author of A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, George Kent believes that when Brooks wrote this poem, she was thinking of her elderly aunt and uncle who “could make a pound of beans go further than a pound of potatoes.” The title, “The Bean Eaters,” was inspired, he suggests, by Van Gogh’s painting The Potato Eaters, that depicts an impoverished Flemish family barely subsisting on potatoes. (Readers are encouraged to look at reproductions of the painting and compare the feelings aroused to those generated by a reading of the poem.)

The line, “Dinner is a casual affair,” like the first line, is not an ordinary statement. Though only five plain words, it is rich with implication. Beans are not usually associated with “dinner,” a term that implies a formal eating situation; an irony is thus established that is fully realized with “casual affair.” “Affair” implies a grand occasion, but that notion is contradicted by “casual,” creating an oxymoron. The ironic tone is sustained for the rest of the stanza: “Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood, / Tin flatware.” “Chipware” is Brooks’s own coinage, adapted from “dinnerware.” Each word connotes a different world. “Dinnerware” implies

What Do I Read Next?

The Selected Poems of Gwendolyn Brooks, reprinted in 1982, is the best and most definitive collection of Brooks’s poems to date.
Brooks is included in a 1989 anthology called An Ear To The Ground, edited by Marie Harris and Kathleen Aguero. The poems collected here celebrate the diversity of America’s poetic voices.
Understanding the New Black Poetry, edited by Stephen Henderson, is slightly dated, but for that reason it gives more space to Brooks’s peers during the years between World War II and the Black Power movement of the 1960s than a more current anthology might.
Gwendolyn Brooks, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Haki Madhabuti, and Dudley Randall each offered ideas that would be relevant to the black writer in A Capsule Course in Black Poetry Writing (Broadside Press, 1977). The project was instigated by Brooks to address issues that were not given enough focus in classes with a broader subject base.
Deborah Pope’s A Separate Vision: Isolation in Contemporary Woman’s Poetry, published in 1984, gives examples of female authors who have a special insight into the type of isolation experienced by the couple in this poem.
Brooks is included in Black Women Writers (1950-1980), a 1984 anthology edited by Marie Evans. This book is unique and interesting because it has each author speaking about her own work, followed by two critical essays about the author and useful biographical information.

wealth, privilege, and elegance, while “chipware” connotes old, cheap, worn-out dishes used by poor people; yet “chipware” also calls up the dignity of “dinnerware.” The single word “chipware” thus leads a double life. “The plain and creaking wood,” a metonymic way of saying “table,” reinforces a sense of poverty, since no mention is made of a finely finished grain, or a tablecloth. The “creaking” is likely produced by loose or missing screws or nails, or glue so old it has dried and shrunk. Consistent with all of the previous images, “Tin flatware” is the cheapest available, though, like “chipware,” the term implies its elegant counterpart, silverware. Like the old yellow pair, it is long-lasting, regardless of its initial cost.

This first stanza is also rich in sounds that express the denotations and connotations of their words. Three rounded “O” sounds offer a mouthful in the first line, followed by soft vowels in the second. These give way to harsher and more dominant consonant combinations in the third and fourth lines. “Tin flatware” almost imitates the sound of spoons and forks hitting plain wood. The repetition of “plain” lends emphasis to the scene represented and sets up a pattern of repetition seen in the next two stanzas.

The line “Two who are Mostly Good” may puzzle readers with its internal capitalizations. On a recording Brooks made of this poem, she does not seem especially to emphasize the two words. What, then, is implied? How different would the old pair appear if they were described as fully or genuinely good? Brooks seems to be making a concession to the idea that no one is completely good, even the old; their lives must be seen through the lens of “Mostly.” In sound values, the line gives relief from the clattering “tin flatware” of the previous line, almost cooing with “Two who” and “Mostly Good.” Thus sentimentality is introduced and the emotional atmosphere of the poem shifts. Brooks has followed her own advice by “telling the reader a little less” in this line, allowing the reader “to do a little digging.” The next line, “Two who have lived their day,” is a slant explanation or expansion of the vague judgment of the previous line. Living one’s day may take many forms, some noble, some not. But, however they have lived, this pair now follows an ordinary routine of “putting on their clothes / And putting things away.” In his book Gwendolyn Brooks, Harry Shaw suggests that their action is perfunctory, that “they are putting things away as if winding down an operation and readying for withdrawal from activity.” The repetition of “putting” is the third repetition of a word within eight lines and creates an expectation that more repetitions will follow. They do, in the third (and last) stanza.

The lines “And remembering ... / Remembering” takes repetition to the level of chanting, as if to imply a prayerful respect for the old pair. The ellipsis, unusual in poetry, breaks the meter of the poem, creating a unique space for the reader to enter these implied lives and ask, “What is forgotten?” The reader is not told what they remember, but instead how they recollect “with twinklings and twinges,” a pair of words with an internal rhyme that twins almost contradictory feelings. Like “Mostly Good,” “twinklings and twinges” has a push-pull quality—a giving and a taking way, or an illustrating by connotation and enacting through sound. These twin words offer alliterative echoes of youth, hope, and stars, contrasted with harsh memories and painful bodily feelings. The stanza then completes itself in what appears to be three lines of prose-like, ordinary speech. It is in fact, as Brooks says, a loosening of “rhythm so that it sounds like human talk.”

The old pair’s actions of eating beans and remembering are variations on acts of rumination that occur “As they lean over the beans.” Harry Shaw proposes that the word “lean” suggests “a transcendence of a period of trouble,” a specialized use of the word by Brooks which can be applied more broadly to the survival of black people. The stoic survival of this old couple, apparently in isolation, relies on a daily routine of nourishment supplied by minimal food and memories supported by “beads and receipts and dolls and cloths, / tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.” This random collection must be read as if sharing qualities with the earlier chipware and tin flatware; they are cheap household items that have been well used over the years. This collection, however, lacks any practical function in the couple’s daily lives. Still, they are nourished by memories supported by this detritus of their past life as they persevere in their rented back room.

While some critics read “The Bean Eaters” as a political statement about social conditions we often ignore, the poem is so boldly and carefully crafted that it stands on its own as a work of art, worthy to be the title poem of one of Brooks’s best collections of poetry.

Source: Mort Rich, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1997.

Maria K. Mootry

Mootry discusses critical reaction to The Bean Eaters.

When The Bean Eaters, Brooks’s third collection of poetry, was published in 1960, America was beset by the upheaval of the civil rights movement. On the black American literary front, fiery spokesperson James Baldwin dissected and rebuked white Americans in his essays, while dramatist Lorraine Hansberry protested racial housing discrimination in the first Broadway play by a black woman, A Raisin in the Sun (1959). Brooks’s audience, like that of Baldwin and Hansberry, was presumably white liberals, because many of the poems in The Bean Eaters originally appeared in major American magazines such as Harper’s, Poetry, and Voices. Brooks’s topical race themes, including the lynching of Emmett Till, Jr. in 1955 and the 1957 court-ordered integration of Arkansas schools, seemed to indicate that in the genre of poetry she assumed a poetic role parallel to that of Hansberry and Baldwin as witness and conscience for white America. But reactions to The Bean Eaters by that audience were oddly mixed.

Some reviewers found The Bean Eaters sufficient in content and form, while others found it too tame in its protest mission; still others were upset and put off by what they deemed an unseemly social emphasis. Thus, one reviewer pointed up the book’s “deep compassion” and “concern for human misery,” and another praised Brooks for touching on a “universal pattern of human suffering.” But others denied the book’s accessibility, accusing Brooks of a “complacent handling of ... racial themes.” Another group attacked Brooks’s style as “an impressionistic method ... too elliptical, private ... and obscure,” with the effect of making “social judgments difficult.” Finally, some found The Bean Eaters a book of “disturbing overtones,” presumably with reference to its social criticism.

In fact, according to Brooks herself, it was the “too Social” quality of The Bean Eaters that frightened reviewers into an initial silence. Not “folksy” like her first volume, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), not “mandarin” like her second Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, Annie Allen (1949), The Bean Eaters, from its inception, presented a problem of interpretation for its critics.

One reason The Bean Eaters aroused such a range of disparate critical assessment was the way Brooks yoked her “social” message to a variety of classic high modernist techniques. By 1960, it should be remembered, the high modernism of Eliot, Pound, and Stevens was already paralleled by a burgeoning countermovement of post-modernism, sometimes labeled “personalism.” Brooks, despite her social concerns, was temperamentally committed to the high-modernist concept of poetry impressed upon her as an apprentice writer. From this perspective, the duty of the modernist poet was to produce poetry that, in Richard Wilbur’s words, “accommodates mixed feelings, clashing ideas, and incongruous images ... the full discordancy of modern life and consciousness ...” Added to this was the tradition of distance between poet and poem, a tradition that downplayed the poet’s own personality and assorted private demons, and demanded instead the type of “verbal scrupulosity” promoted by the New Criticism. In contrast, postmodernist poets of the late 1950s such as the black poet LeRoi Jones (now Imamu Baraka) and the female poet Sylvia Plath, spilled their “psychic guts” with unabashed forays into personal emotional suffering, while their contemporaries, the Beat poets, practiced other more social forms of personalism, with Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and others howling private/public jeremiads at America’s sins.

Brooks avoided either extreme. If late modernists such as Plath and Baraka seemed obscure because of their poetry’s inward biographical resonance, Brooks’s obscurity rested on her meticulous craft. And if the visionary Beat poets were embarrassingly loud in their denunciations of America’s social ills, Brooks was content with “disturbing undertones.” Thus, Brooks located her rhetoric of social critique, her poetic discourse, in a range of studied poetic techniques, a slanted intentionality. This strategy allowed Brooks to “insinuate” her truths rather than to resort to the old-fashioned didacticism that, for many new critics, marred the work of her older contemporaries, such as then-poet-laureate Robert Frost. It equally allowed her to move beyond an entropic exclusive high-modernist “art for art’s sake” aesthetic, and to do what her predecessor Emily Dickinson once advised: “Tell all the Truth, but tell it slant.”

Therefore, even in the most potent “social” poems of The Bean Eaters, Brooks practices a modernist eclecticism, manipulating modes and infusing mixed techniques from different genres into her poetic architecture. In particular, as many critics have noted, Brooks uses characters and personae as her modernist predecessor T. S. Eliot used them, with attendant settings, situations, and voices to express her ideas. The result is that many of her poems achieve a dual purpose: They present a “drama of human consciousness” at the same time that they present disguised arguments or systems of discourse.... The Bean Eaters poems frequently show characters struggling to piece together fragments of

“... Brooks uses characters and personae as her modernist predecessor T. S. Eliot used them, with attendant settings, situations, and voices to express her ideas. The result is that many of her poems achieve a dual purpose: They present a ‘drama of human consciousness’ at the same time that they present disguised arguments or systems of discourse...”

perceptions of a variety of social forces. These people try to make sense of what is happening in the world around them and in the process provide a unifying revisionist project for The Bean Eaters. By presenting this collage-like series of vignettes, this gallery of persons immobilized or driven by frayed hopes and frustrated wants, Brooks, in The Bean Eaters, makes “hit-and-run” attacks on a number of beliefs, values, or ideals that were destructive to mid-twentieth-century America.

As characters in The Bean Eaters struggle with “the full discordancy of modern life and consciousness,” their ultimate function is ... to uncover negative social relations. Thus naming, gestures, and dramatic portrayals of character function extradiegetically, or outside the text’s plot and depiction of character. This function is often revealed in narrative tone, particularly where the tone is satirical or caricatural, as in two poems about encounters between blacks and whites, “Mrs. Small” and “Lovers of the Poor.” The result of this added layer of text is an intensification of disguise and duplicity. To further enrich her poetic texture, the disguise and duplicity inherent in Brook’s rendering of character is then extended to ancillary aspects of the text—its setting, situation (dramatic encounter), metaphors, images, and figures. For the initiated reader, the unfolding disguise leads to discovery as Brooks shatters conventional expectations. Let us look at setting as an example. In many Bean Eaters poems, Brooks uses typical women’s space—domestic scenes in bedrooms, living rooms, and kitchens—with a revisionist thrust. Usually settings for dalliance or harmonious domestic activities such as cooking or caring for family members, Brooks makes them the loci of conflict, disruption, or tragedy. In this way she plays on the 1950s American popular ideal of home life and housewifery, promoted in large part to get World War II working mothers back into the kitchen. Instead of bolstering this myth, Brooks reveals the underlying racial or gender conflicts it obscures. Thus setting is often discordant with situation, as when sexual encounters occur in urban hallways instead of romantic pastoral locations (“A Lovely Love”), or when murder takes place among “neighbors” on the neighborhood block (“The Ballad of Rudolph Reed”), or when home becomes a hell rather than a haven (“A Sunset of the City,” “Mississippi Mother”). Love in alleys, death in boudoirs, and violence in the community establish an antithetical, oxymoronic use of setting consonant with modernist irony.... If some readers found The Bean Eaters to be a book with “disturbing under-tones,” they were not mistaken; but the awakening of a society’s conscience is never pleasant, is perforce, disturbing. That Brooks did not shrink from this revisionist “project” is a testament to her refusal to let “objective” craft obscure her role as a social commentator. In her subsequent volumes this discourse would shed its “insinuating” garb, and she would speak more forthrightly.

Source: Maria K. Mootry, “Tell It Slant”: Disguise and Discovery as Revisionist Poetic Discourse in “The Bean Eaters.” in A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction, 1987 pp. 177-80, 191.

Sources

Brooks, Gwendolyn, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Haki R. Madhubuti, and Dudley Randall, A Capsule Course in Black Poetry Writing, Broadside Press, 1975.

Kent, George, “Gwendolyn Brooks’s Poetic Realism: A Developmental Survey,” in Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984, pp. 88-105.

Melhem, D.H., Gwendolyn Brooks—Poetry and the Heroic Voice, University Press of Kentucky, 1987.

For Further Study

Cashman, Sean Dennis, African-Americans and the Quest for Civil Rights 1900-1990, New York: New York University Press, 1991.

By studying the historical context of how active the Civil Rights movement was at the time when Brooks wrote this poem, it is easy to see the couple’s isolation as especially tragic. Cashman’s book is full of anecdotes that make the time period come alive.

Clark, Norris B., “Gwendolyn Brooks and a Black Aesthetic,” in A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction, edited by Maria K. Mootry and Gary Smith, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987, pp. 81-92.

Clark makes a strong case for this poem being primarily about the old couple’s race in his examination of Brooks’s career as a leading black poet.

Kent, George, A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1990.

This biography, written by a friend of Brooks and containing an introduction by D. H. Melham, gives a “behind-the-scenes” look at the poet’s life and helps the reader understand her inspirations, which are not very evident in her poetry.

Melham, D. H., Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice, Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1987.

This source is primarily biographical, but it also mixes in some literary analysis, giving background about Brooks’s life at the time the poem was published.

Shaw, Henry B., Gwendolyn Brooks, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980.