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  • “When De Saint Go Ma’Chin’ Home”: Sterling Brown’s Blueprint for a New Negro Poetry * **
  • Robert Stepto (bio)

Perhaps it is fitting in celebrating Sterling Brown’s eightieth birthday and career of great achievement to turn once again to his first published poem, “When de Saints Go Ma’ching Home.” 1 It is a Big Boy Davis poem—“the guitar-plunkin” singer of marching saints is Big Boy—and it is the only “Big Boy” poem specifically dedicated to him. 2 The dedication reads:

(To Big Boy Davis, Friend.
In Memories of Days Before He Was
Chased Out of Town for Vagrancy.)

Such a dedication has a way of bringing a smile to our lips; so much is afoot here in what is, for Brown, a typically mischievous way. Obviously, Big Boy was a character, a roustabout, a “terribly unemployed dude” as Toni Morrison would remark. Evidently, however, he was much more than a colourful vagrant in the eyes of some, those folks including Sterling Brown, the author and persona. While Brown appreciates and often reveres the “characters” in our shops and churches, neighbourhoods and towns, and while he often writes about them, he rarely if ever dedicates poems to them. This poem is dedicated to Big Boy because he was not merely a character but a friend and guide, not merely an entertainer but an artist, and most particularly because he was a singer and hence creator of community even though, in the eyes of the law, he was a man with no visible means of support.

Brown’s dedication is therefore in some sense ironic: the town is not necessarily the community—especially as community may be constituted and defined by shared performances of expressive culture; the law is not necessarily the will of the people; the unemployed and allegedly idle are not necessarily bereft of direction and values and without employment of another kind. It is also a dedication that is sincere. Big Boy’s example gave Sterling Brown a clear understanding of how to begin to create a written art which would not only portray or “call the names” of the folk but also perform the didactic functions of communal expressive culture. Quite to the point, “When de Saints” does not merely portray Big Boy—any more than Brown’s “Ma Rainey” merely portrays that great singer. Instead, it offers, through its evocation of a communal performance of “When de Saints” inspired by Big Boy, a blueprint for a new poetry in what we inadequately call the folk manner. [End Page 940]

Part I of the poem establishes Big Boy as a redoubtable storyteller and bard; as a figure who is something more than an entertainer. It also makes clear that his concert is a shared, communal, “folk” event. The first stanza reads as follows:

He’d play, after the bawdy songs and blues, After the weary plaints Of “Trouble, Trouble deep down in muh soul,” Always one song in which he’d lose the rôle Of entertainer to the boys. He’d say, “My mother’s favorite.” And we knew That what was coming was his chant of saints, “When de saints go ma’chin’ home. . . .” And that would end his concert for the day. 3

One notices immediately that the “we” used throughout is not a gratuitous, editorial “we.” It is an aggregate or shared “we” connoting terms like “neighbours,” “kin,” “listeners,” “audience,” and, more abstractly, “performance group.” It refers to folk who will share in the chant, possibly by being “saints” to be numbered (as we observe in part II) or by telling or singing of Big Boy in future recreations of “When de Saints” such as the poem before us.

Like any other audience fully participating in the creation of a shared artistic event, Big Boy’s gathering has certain expectations which he, as performance leader, must meet. The phrase “. . . we knew / That what was coming was his chant of saints” tells us that the audience expects (and apparently is about to receive) a repetition of an orchestrated performance witnessed before. They don’t want something new. The repetition of the old songs, the re-appearance of familiar, anchoring visions...

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