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Analysis Of Gwendolyn Brook's The Sundayss Of Satin-Legs Smith

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No time and place in history encompasses the relationship between race and place so well as Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s. Artists and writers such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and countless others synergized to create a period of explosion of African American art and culture. Harlem provided a central location for many African Americans to reexamine their own culture, their place in America, and the life of the neighborhood of Harlem itself. Satin-Legs Smith, too, has his place in the thriving community of Harlem. Gwendolyn Brook’s characterization of Satin-Legs Smith is a perfect description of a zoot-suiter, or a so-called hep cat. According to the Merriam Webster online dictionary, a hep-cat is defined as a “a person who knows …show more content…

It is doubtless that Satin Legs Smith is fully aware of his king-like nature; we are presented with the visual of him slowly and beautifully waking himself next to his lover, as if in the beginning act of a great performance. “He wakes unwinds, elaborately: a cat/ Tawny, reluctant, royal. He is fat/ And fine this morning. Definite. Reimbursed” (Brookes). Indeed, much of “The Sundays of Satin Legs Smith” seems to be an intricate performance on the part of Satin Legs Smith. “He waits a moment, he designs his reign, /That no performance may be plain or vain” (Brookes). The intentionality of Satin Legs Smith’s every movement implies that this regality is not natural to him. Brookes confirms that Satin Leg Smith’s presentation is at least partially a façade in the 5th stanza- “But you forget, or did you ever know, /His heritage of cabbage and pigtails, /Old intimacy with alleys, garbage pails, /Down in the deep (but always beautiful) South “(Brookes). It is now confirmed for the reader that Satin Legs Smith is, at least partially, his own creation, and that we, the reader, are not privy to the truth about his …show more content…

In Satin Legs Smith’s morning ritual, we see this theme play out on a microcosmic level. First, we see his celebration of himself and of his body. “He looks into his mirror, loves himself— /The neat curve here; the angularity /That is appropriate at just its place; /The technique of a variegated grace” (Brookes). In this same stanza, we have Satin Legs Smith enhancing and altering his art with other things indicative of his proud identity. “These kneaded limbs receive the kiss of silk. /Then they receive the brave and beautiful /Embrace of some of that equivocal wool” (Brookes). Just as Satin Legs Smith has bestowed upon himself royalty, he has named himself art and adorns himself as such. The reader is left to decide for themselves whether Satin Legs Smith’s flamboyance and dedication to his “performance” can be deemed as art. However, Brookes, through the narrator, makes the argument that it can. “Here is all his sculpture and his art /And all his architectural design. /Perhaps you would prefer to this a fine/Value of marble, complicated stone./ Would have him think with horror of baroque, /Rococo. You forget and you forget” (Brookes). Brookes reminds us that though Satin Legs Smith’s art is not Shakespearean, and has no common ground with Michelangelo, it is his own, and it is still art. Satin Legs Smith’s art is bold and flashy, it eludes the white

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