21 pages • 42 minutes read
Gwendolyn BrooksThe Blackstone Rangers
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Promise of Black Power
The premise of the more militant liberation movements of the 1960s was that there could be such a thing as Black power globally. The Black Panthers, who relied on symbols such as the Black fist and guns to communicate the seriousness of the pursuit of power for Black people, were just one of several groups who upended the nonviolent movement for civil rights in the United States. In “The Blackstone Rangers,” Brooks explores what it means once Black power is confined to territories.
Brooks portrays the Blackstone Rangers as an example of the failure of traditional politics to achieve the aims of the struggle for Black liberation. This failure is rooted in the ineffective response of traditional civil rights figures and organizations to conditions on the ground for working-class, urban people in cities like Chicago. Activists who should be a source of order and connection for people like the Blackstone Rangers are “the dupes of the downtown thing” (Line 8), meaning they have been co-opted by the traditional political stakeholders in the city of Chicago; worse, “their jobs were tied to their involvement in the maintenance of the machine” (Hampton, Henry, and Fayer, Steve. Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s. Random House, 2011, p. 301).
Popular figures associated with Black liberation, from Malcolm X (dead three years before the publication of the poem) and Black Jesus (the reclamation of the historical Jesus as a person of color who identified with the oppressed) are so distant from the day-to-day experiences of people like the Blackstone Rangers that such figures fail to provide a model of what effective Black power looks like in the present moment of the poem. “Hardly” (Lines 8 and 12) can also mean “just barely,” so the Blackstone Rangers may not be these figures, but their realization of power after a fashion makes them just as worthy of note as the figures to which Brooks alludes. When Brooks writes that the Black Rangers’ “country is a Nation on no map” (Line 15), that capitalized “N” is a nod to the imagined community of Black people that Black nationalists hoped would lead to an actual global community of Black people united for the purpose of Black liberation.
The by turns wistful and horrified tone of the poem shows that what Black people have instead are increasingly more organized street gangs operating out in the open (the Blackstone Rangers’ alternate name was the Blackstone P. Stone Nation) and young women like Mary Ann, who must “settle” (Line 63) for a life that is far less than what she aspires to.
Inner City Blues
By the late 1960s, Chicago’s historic housing segregation and urban policy concentrated poor and Black people in districts of the city that lacked even the bare minimum of services needed for survival. Chicago was not alone in this. In “The Blackstone Rangers,” Brooks attempts to give voice to the reality of Black, urban identity, and the picture she paints is a dire one. Brooks relies on diction and metaphor to portray the significance of the power of the Blackstone Rangers in Chicago.
There are multiple metaphors to describe just what the Blackstone Rangers are, but the first one, “[s]ores in the city” (Line 4), is a metaphor that implies the city is an ailing body, and the Blackstone Rangers are just symptoms of an underlying disease. For traditional law enforcement, tasked with disciplining these organizations, the Blackstone Rangers represent Black anarchy. Brooks uses the word “monstrous” (Lines 28 and 29) three times in the turn in the second part of the poem. A “pearl” (Line 31) is created when an oyster or mussel layers the substance nacre over parasites or other irritants that attack their fleshy bodies. The Blackstone Rangers are a “monstrous pearl” (Line 29) because they provide belonging to young men in that part of the city, but they may end as parasites that damage their already ailing community. Even the speakers of the second part of the poem are ambivalent about what their power means.
In Part 3, Brooks moves out to the periphery of the Blackstone Rangers by zeroing in on Mary Ann. Mary Ann is “a rose in a whisky glass” (Line 39). Consider that a whisky glass is a bottom-heavy, chunky vessel designed specifically for the consumption of an intoxicant, and that flowers were not meant be fed on whisky. Alcohol kills flowers, and a whisky glass is far from a vase. It is too short to allow a rose what it needs to climb.
Chicago’s nourishment for the dreams of girls like Mary Ann is thin and inadequate. This metaphor for what Mary Ann is implies that she is consumed by the challenges of being a young woman affiliated with the gang. It also implies that there is something unhealthy about that connection. She’s surviving, but what she feeds on isn’t wholesome enough to sustain her. For Mary Ann and individual Blackstone Rangers, the kind of power they exercise in the South Side of Chicago is power that destroys rather than builds up individuals and communities.
Connection and Alienation
Although Brooks represents the Blackstone Rangers as the result of the thwarted potential of Black liberation, she takes pains to show that the Rangers and Mary Ann are driven by the deep human desire to overcome their alienation from society and each other. Mary Ann in particular has a longing to connect with others beyond the limited life available to her as a “Rangerette” (Line 30). Brooks uses the geography of the city to represent alienation and the failure to connect.
Mary Ann’s existence is characterized by longing to escape the territory of the Black Rangers. She longs for “Cities of blue and jewel” (Line 34), a reference to the glass of skyscrapers, many of which were built in places where working-class people formerly lived. Instead, she is confined to “the Ranger rim of Cottage Grove” (Line 35), the street that, along with Blackstone Avenue, likely forms the geographic boundaries of her existence.
She could date other boys/men, but being with them would “dissolve no margins” (Line 37) because the boundary she wants to cross is also social; crossing it likely comes with dangerous repercussions. What she has instead of true connection is her “bugle-love” (Line 46), a Blackstone Ranger whose relationship with her announces his status, not hers. The best she can hope for is something more, even if it is just sex and “non-loneliness” (Line 65), which is not the same thing as love. Mary Ann’s predicament shows that the conditions of life in the inner city foreclose meaningful love and sex, two basic ways that humans connect with each other.
Related Titles
By Gwendolyn Brooks
