the house tour that wasn’t

Gwendolyn Brooks (middle right) in a mural celebrating women at the Chicago Cultural Center

The woman came charging out the front door holding her phone in the air, and she was pissed.

“If you all don’t get out of here, I’m calling the police,” she shouted to the group of about 20 people standing on the sidewalk in front of her white clapboard house.

“I know this is Ms. Brooks’s house, but that doesn’t mean you can just walk on up here and look at it. People live here, you know.”

It was a hot Saturday morning in early June, and she definitely had a point. We’d pulled up in a coach bus that barely fit between the cars parked on both sides of South Evans Avenue, and while our intentions were good — we were on a tour of Chicago’s south side neighborhood where the poet Gwendolyn Brooks lived — well, just imagine if a bunch of strangers poured out of a bus in front of your house and then proceeded to stand there and gawk at it. I mean, I get mad when folks block my driveway to shop our block’s annual yard sale.

Across the street, a group of kids watched as we filed back into the bus, chastised. One woman on the tour, which was hosted by the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, was Gwendolyn Brooks’s youngest child; she stayed behind to talk to the homeowner, but even she admitted that the house stop may not have been the best idea. She was raised in the house that her mother lived in from 1953 to 1994, but it remains a private residence despite the plaque in the sidewalk marking its historic significance.

In a way though, the residential setting fits the legacy of Brooks, whose poetry is rooted in the black experience of living in Chicago.

Brooks, whose parents moved to Chicago when she was six weeks old, was a prominent member of the Chicago Black Renaissance, a literary and arts movement that began in the 1930s and flourished through the 1950s. The period marked an explosion in music (blues, in particular), the visual and performing arts, and especially literature, including Brooks, playwright Lorraine Hansberry (whose play, “A Raisin in the Sun,” was the first play written by a Black woman to be performed on Broadway) and Richard Wright (author of Native Son, among other notable works).

The idea of home was a central theme in Brooks’s poetry, which focused on the struggles and celebrations of ordinary life. Her first book, A Street in Bronzeville, explores the idea of community, while Annie Allen, her second book, observes the life of a young girl growing up in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. Annie Allen earned Brooks the Pulitzer Prize in 1950, the first to be awarded to an African American. A writer since childhood, Brooks was named Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968, and Poet Laureate of the United States in 1985. She died in her Chicago home in 2000.

The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame has apparently worked out the kinks for its new Chicago’s Black Renaissance Bus Tour on May 4, 2019. Stops include the homes of Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry and Richard Wright, as well as the South Side Community Art Center, The Chicago Defender (Chicago’s first African-American owned newspaper) and the George Cleveland Hall Branch of the Chicago Public Library. More information can be found here.