31 pages • 1 hour read
Gwendolyn BrooksWe Real Cool
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1960A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
The Recklessness of Youth
We learn a lot about the pool players of “We Real Cool,” as Brooks’s spare but precisely chosen words leave a remarkably clear impression. Rebellious and carefree, the pool players bristle with youthful bravado in their collective chant. Skipping school to go to the pool hall, the young men have escaped the confines of the mundane for the sake of fun. In a chorus, they proclaim that they hang out on their own as long as they can, joking around, competing at pool, and causing mischief.
The phrase “Strike straight” (Line 6) seems, at first, to refer to the boys’ skills with a pool cue. However, Brooks might also include this powerful verb, strike, to indicate aggressive behavior, either within the group or with others. A quintessential phrase about youthful rebellion is “Sing sin” (Line 7). Like many teenagers, the boys indulge in whatever vices they can when removed from teachers, administrators, and parents: drinking gin (which they water down) and listening to jazz.
The title of the poem, and the line to which it refers, clinches the boys’ elevated sense of self: “We real cool,” (Line 3), they brag, invoking the teenage anthem of expanding boundaries and the limits of freedom. However, as Brooks herself noted in her comments on the poem, their confidence is not as sturdy as it may appear. When a reader utters the poem aloud, each we that ends a line accompanies an intake of breath. This gasping we, which Brooks pronounced in singular fashion whenever she read the poem in public, unites the players’ eager assertions of self and their uneasy grasp on their identity.
The Precariousness of Life
Although the pool players of “We Real Cool” glory in their youthful exploits, their downfall bookends the poem. Brooks begins with a couplet that sets the scene at a pool hall, “THE GOLDEN SHOVEL” (Line 2). The final sentence of the poem sees the young men foretelling their own death. The name of the pool hall begins is a foreboding reference to a grave-digging tool. The shovel’s gold has value and aesthetic appeal, but it doesn’t change the tool’s purpose or the fate of the young men.
Many young people live as if they will never die; the pool players seem at first to exemplify the eternal youth that many adolescents believe they possess. However, after boasting about a life lived seemingly without consequences, they invoke their imminent mortality. What began as a triumphant list of rebellions becomes a tragic prophecy. They seem to know, with an otherworldly sense, that their lives will be short and easily lost. Neither their youth, nor their surety, nor their group bond will save them.
Brooks does not state why the young men expect to die. However, her predominant social, political, and geographic interests may provide context for one interpretation of this dark prediction. Brooks’ meditations on black life in America filled many volumes of her poetry and prose, as well as informed her public advocacy work. As she wrote the poems of The Bean Eaters in the 1950s, young black men were the target of violence from police and white civilians alike. Emmett Till, the young black man lynched by white men in 1955, is the subject of two poems in The Bean Eaters. Although little is known about the pool players of “We Real Cool,” they may be young black men who expect to suffer at the hands of the white establishment, whether prompted by their truancy, or simply the color of their skin.
Playfulness and Innocence
The final line of the poem portends an early death for the seven young men at the pool hall, contrasting with the darkly comic playfulness that characterizes the imagery and tone of the previous nine lines. The activities in which the boys partake, give them opportunities to assert their independence in the face of adult authority. Though their decisions to skip school and drink alcohol underage are transgressive, they are mildly so; the poem does not suggest that their truancy and drinking, in the moment the poem depicts, is particularly harmful. However, the final line of the poem accelerates the consequences of the boys’ decision to abandon school and the opportunities an education could afford them, and the innocence that characterizes their adolescent laziness and boredom becomes profoundly sinister.
The juxtaposition of the final line with the catalog of playful distractions that appear in those previous reinforces the other themes of the poem (listed above). It draws attention to the speaker’s disturbing assumption that the collective “we” of the poem are doomed to an unfairly premature death, simply for being themselves. The tone of the poem enhances the reader’s appreciation of this theme as its rhythms suggest a childhood chant or even a motto written and performed by a group of friends to bring them closer together in their brotherhood. The appearance of the last line of the poem transforms the defiantly childish rhythms of the poem into something angry, suggesting that the theme of playfulness and innocence is actually a cover for something darker and more aggressive that lurks in the boys’ lives, despite their allegiance to each other. The darkness that lurks may in fact explain why the boys have become a gang; aimless and untethered, they gravitate towards each other for safety and comfort, as well as play and companionship, only to meet their demise before their time.
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By Gwendolyn Brooks
