“Description of Maud Martha” by Gwendolyn Brooks in Maud Martha
Caption: “Description of Maud Martha” is the first chapter of Gwendolyn Brooks’s only novel Maud Martha (1954). While Maud Martha is a novel, it is very poetic not only in the poignancy of its descriptions but also in its focus on moments and essence rather than a narrative plot. The 34 chapters or vignettes are relatively short. They each have a number and a title, and many of them read as if they want to be a prose poem. There is however a plot an a main character. Maud Martha, a plain-looking, (only tentatively) middle-class black girl coming of age in Chicago in the late 1920s , is the main character. The novel follows the ordinary parts of an arguably mundane life: keeping house, being a domestic servant, having a baby, dealing with racism, and going to the movies, but it focuses on the complexity of feeling and intensity of imagination that animates such a mundane life.
This first chapter is a perfect example of the style. Nothing happens plot wise in this chapter except that we are introduced to Maud Martha (and to her sister Helen). What we do get is a sense of how Maud Martha revels in the small details of the dandelions in her yard. They are everyday, but in as much as they allow her to imagine a whole meadow and exotic flowers, they bring a sense of expansiveness into her world. And as she identifies with the flower, the dandelions also ask us to think about everyday things (and everyday people) as beautiful jewels rather than bothersome weeds.
- Description of Maud Martha
What she liked was candy buttons, and books, and painted music (deep blue, or delicate silver) and the west sky, so altering, viewed from the steps of the back porch: and dandelions.
She would have liked a lotus, or China asters or the Japanese Iris, or meadow lilies—yes, she would have liked meadow lilies, because the very word meadow made her breathe more deeply, and either fling her arms or want to fling her arms, depending on who was by, rapturously up to whatever was watching in the sky. But dandelions were what she chiefly saw. Yellow jewels for everyday studding the patched green dress of her back yard. She liked their demure prettiness second to their everydayness; for in that latter quality she thought she saw a picture of herself, and it was comforting to find that what was common could also be a flower.
And could be cherished! To be cherished was the dearest wish of the heart of Maud Martha Brown, and sometimes when she was not looking at dandelions (for one would not be looking at them all the time, often there were chairs and tables to dust or tomatoes to slice or beds to make or grocery stores to be gone to, and in the colder months there were no dandelions at all), it was hard to believe that a thing of only ordinary allurements—if the allurements of any flower could be said to be ordinary—was as easy to love as a thing of heart-catching beauty.
Such as her sister Helen! Who was only two years past her own age of seven, and was almost her own height and weight and thickness. But oh, the long lashes, the grace, the little ways with the hands and feet.
-Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha