Helen Morgan Brooks, with several covers from her poetry books behind her. Photo: Generated by Friend staff.
A clear lens: Jonathan Doering on Quaker poet Helen Morgan Brooks
‘Spiritual, political, lyrical, gritty.’
Helen Morgan Brooks may not be a name that British Quakers are familiar with, but her compelling life story, and affecting poetry, are sure to make a mark on anyone who takes time to acquaint themselves with her.
While researching Quaker poetry as part of an MA at Woodbrooke, I was lucky enough to discover Brooks’ work, and I realised that she is an excellent embodiment of a concept that I was developing of a Quaker literary aesthetic. I would also argue that Brooks is an important Quaker poet because she was an integrated person while living out Quaker faith & practice 28.11, producing ‘creative writing born of imagination and spirit, and speaking in universal tones that will be understood by many [unfamiliar with] the common presentations of Christianity’.
Brooks was born in 1904, into relatively humble beginnings. Her father was a barber, her mother a homemaker; Helen was the eldest of their six children. She had to contend early with the challenges of poverty: when the family moved from Reading, Pennsylvania, to Philadelphia, the family struggled financially, leading to Brooks being placed in care for a year before rejoining the family.
Despite these early challenges, Helen secured her education at St Augustine’s College, graduating with a BA in Home Economics at the age of twenty, before working as a home economist, then as a catering teacher, and later studying Education at Temple University. In 1930, she married William T Brooks, later separating. Having no children, she was a much-loved aunt to her many nephews and nieces.
In the 1940s, Brooks held a fellowship at Pendle Hill, during which time she wrote a reflection in the log book that includes a hard-headed prayer for: ‘The worn prostitutes, the whoremongers, the parasitical, the slaves of uncertainty, the nervous, the mentally deficient, the failing, the unwanted, the lonely, the degraded, the fallible, the delusioned, the dejected, the injured, the maligned, the sick, the weak’. In 1959 she came into formal membership of the Religious Society of Friends at Arch Street Meeting, Philadelphia, setting about involving herself on many levels within the Society, serving as a manager of both Friends Hospital and Friends Journal, as well as becoming a trustee of Friends Select School. She was also a member of the Peace and Race Relations Committee of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.
Throughout her life, running alongside all these activities and interests, and intertwining with them, was Helen’s life and work as a poet. She wrote poetry for many years, publishing several collections, winning the Poundstone Poetry Prize, and the Delaware Poetry Society Award twice. Her work was anthologised by Langston Hughes in 1964 and 1970, and she was the editor of the poetry magazine Approach.
Even in her creative writing, Helen could be hands-on and down-to-earth. For instance, in 1955 she published A Practical Guide: One person, one meal, one burner, aimed at supporting people with a weekly food budget of US$5 (approximately equating to US$60 today).
Brooks’ contemporary Martin Luther King Jr hoped for ‘radiant stars of love’ to ‘shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty’. Helen was able to hold these ambitions in one hand without relinquishing the clear lenses she held in the other. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her poetry: spiritual, political, lyrical, gritty.
‘Meeting for Worship’, for example, is brief, laconic in the best Quaker sense, achieving a haiku-like rendering of the sense of being gathered within worship: ‘We are embraced/ by the silence/ that was there,/ expecting us,/ when we entered.’ The personification and collective first-person plural pronouns here create an immediate sense of a spiritual zone that can hold and nurture anyone who enters it.
‘An unfussy, skilful handling of sensory details.’
Now try this considered, turned poetry, offering hard truths in ‘Slum House’: ‘…only the brown earth shows,/ bare, hard, smooth – trampled’. The triplet of monosyllables echoes the sense of dreary trudging in so many lives blighted by poverty. Brooks then leads us inside the slum house where we can discern for ourselves how ‘the odour of hog meat permeates/ the walls, and the liquor fumes stalk/ the stairs like demented ghosts.’ An unfussy, skilful handling of sensory details, connecting with the sinister sibilance of ‘stalks the stairs’ and the simile of ‘like demented ghosts’, deftly evokes poverty’s threats and horrors, in a moment thrown into sharp relief against the cave wall of the mind. This sort of brisk emotional honesty, and a refusal to drench unpleasant realities in any sweet syrup, has led the Quaker academic Diane Reynolds to praise Brooks as an example of ethical Quaker writing: ‘Rather than try to impose a normalising morality on us, Brooks invites us into a world of ugliness and beauty, cruelty and grace, pain and love, not a false, enamel world where pain has been removed, but a real world in which God moves among the suffering.’
This of course does not mean that the resulting poetry will be unaesthetic, inaccessible, or difficult to read. For further proof of that, we only need to turn to a poem like ‘Black child’. A meditation on the different perspectives on, and identities within, being black, we read such lines as: ‘This child is called black-/… she is not the black – a black of one’s true Love’s heart,/…Her black can be the colour of honey,/ Or sunsets lowering,/ The colour of autumn leaves mingled/…Black can be the colour of sand – / Seashore sand, washed by the movement of/ Rhythmic waves criss-crossing.’
Here, Brooks gently but firmly negates lazy stereotyping, laying out some of the various forms of blackness, weaving in apparent paradox, sensory imagery, and sibilance to lend her message a deep underlying momentum, building towards a powerful cumulative effect.
Months before her death from cancer at the age of eighty-five, Brooks remarked to her sister, ‘I simply want to sit on the beach and watch the wonder of the rain, smell its fragrance and marvel at the miracle of God’s works.’ Such was the esteem that she was held in among Friends that there were three Memorial Meetings to mark her passing.
I am acutely aware that I am a white, middle class man reading the work of a black woman writer. In no way do I wish to appropriate or co-opt Brooks’ work. I do, on the other hand, have a genuine hope that Quaker readers, and indeed readers more generally, may take a greater interest in her writing, and explore some of the literary and cultural riches that it offers, embodying as it does ‘a living experience’ coupled with ‘genuine thought in clear and effective form’.
Helen Morgan Brooks’ work appears in several collections, including I Choose Love. Her poem ‘The bus comes’ appears in this edition of the Friend.
