The Truth about Strong Men, Riding Horses
Gwendolyn Brooks was a black American poet who began writing poetry when she was very young. She published her first poem when she was thirteen and by the time she was sixteen she had a collection of over seventy poems.
She was born in Kansas, but moved to Chicago with her family when she was six weeks old. [At that time Chicago was and still is now the only large city in the US with its original Democrat political machine going all the way back to the 1800s. Before World War II and at a time when the Democrat system of racial apartheid in the South still existed, racial discrimination appeared to be replicated de facto in large Democrat-controlled northern cities. Interesting that the DNC right now has returned to the scene of former and ongoing Democrat crimes for their 2024 Convention. And it’s telling that the party that spent the better part of a century suppressing the voting rights of southern black citizens has decided to become inclusive and violate the voting rights of Democrat primary voters of every race by imposing on them a candidate for President they never voted for. And they’re doing so in a city where Democrat Joseph Kennedy paid the mob to steal votes so his son, John F. Kennedy, could swing a very narrow electoral vote victory over Richard Nixon for President.] Gwendolyn Brookes’s life growing up as a young black girl on the south side and experiencing that transplanted racial prejudice gave her many ideas to use in her poetry. She lived for 83 years and published many books and received many important awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950.
Two of her famous poems are “Strong Men, Riding Horses” and “truth.” They seem different but are really very similar.
“Strong Men, Riding Horses” shows details that can be related to her experiences growing up on the south side of Chicago. “truth” doesn’t include any personal details but it describes her understanding of everyone’s relation to truth. “Strong Men, Riding Horses” may show some of her biographical details in the way she describes the powerful versus the powerless to give the reader an idea of which group she was in, but in “truth” she shows she is part of the group that includes everyone no matter what color they are or how much money or power or education they have.
Both of the poems show the large contrasts that exist in human life between the powerful and the powerless (the strong men versus the urban poor), between fantasy and reality (movies that provide escape from the horrors of real life), and between truth and falsehood (“fierce hammering” and “snug unawareness”).
She uses repeated phrases in both poems to emphasize those points. In Strong Men, Riding Horses, she writes “except that strong men are desert-eyed. Except that strong men are pasted to stars already.” In Truth, “Shall we not dread him, Shall we not fear him”; “Though we have wept, Though we have prayed”; “Shall we not shudder? Shall we not flee”; and, “Sweet is it, sweet is it.”
“Strong Men, Riding Horses” is a poem that talks about how powerless people view themselves and is so good that reading it hurts. The subtitle “Lester after the Western” is talking about a boy going to a movie.
Back when she wrote this, like now, people like Lester went to movies to forget their troubles for a little while by watching something more exciting than their own life or by watching people who had even more troubles than they did. In some of those movies, the people overcame the trouble and Lester could think for a little while that maybe he could overcome his troubles too. In other movies, they were eaten by monsters or killed in a storm or a war or murdered or suffered something horrible and Lester could think, “Well, at least I don’t have it that bad.” But right at the beginning of the poem, Brooks says that kind of promise of relief doesn’t last.
When she begins with “strong men, riding horses in the west on a plain five hundred miles, a thousand, reaching from dawn to sunset,” the reader has a sense of far horizons and unlimited hopes, like he gets at the beginning of a book when the whole story and all of its enjoyment and hope are ahead of him and all his troubles in the real world are left behind, out of sight and out of mind.
But the limitations of the movie are like the limitations of one’s own day. There’s daybreak and there’s nightfall, there’s a beginning and there’s an end: it’s “rested blue to orange, from hope to crying.” The end of the day, the sunset that the strong men ride off into, is the end of the movie and it’s the end of the hope for a little relief from the real troubles of life, and the loss of hope leads to crying by Lester after the western.
After opening on the broad western vista traversed by strong men on their horses, Brooks immediately begins listing all the ways those strong men are different from Lester: “except that strong men are desert-eyed, except that strong men are pasted to stars already.” Repeating “except that strong men” is like poking her finger into Lester’s skinny chest (and all the Lesters reading that poem) to emphasize the contrast by making him feel even smaller and weaker than he did when he went into the theater.
The type of movie in this poem is the Western adventure. These movies were very popular during the 1940s and 1950s, especially among boys. They usually showed a strong, good guy on a horse, a hero who fought and defeated the bad guy or who struggled and overcame some kind of adversity. Brooks uses the images found in this type of movie to emphasize the contrast between movie life and the kind of life that Lester really experienced living as a poor minority boy in a big city during a time of racial discrimination.
In those movies, the strong men don’t cry. They are “desert-eyed.” They are strong or “broad of chest.” They are “pasted to stars already.” That means they are usually the law or are working for the law because the sheriffs in these movies have a badge that was a star.
They are the good guys. They start the movie already strong and are already on the right side. Lester never sees how they became strong men or how they learned to be desert-eyed or how they developed their broad chests or learned to ignore the challenges of the bad guy or were able to fight against the bad guy and win. They are just that way from the beginning of the movie with no history and no explanation.
And although Brooks doesn’t say it, the good guys in these movies almost always wore white hats and had good hair and were shaved and the bad guys almost always wore black hats and had dirty hair and weren’t shaved very well (“We don’t need no stinking badges!”).
When she wrote this poem in 1960, she didn’t even need to allude to these characteristics because everyone already knew them. Lester, presumably a black boy living on the south side of Chicago, inside the theater would have seen himself cheering for the white hats pasted to stars already fighting against the black hats, but outside the theater, he would have been the black kid who was being fought against by white cops wearing stars or badges or by other people who had the law on their side or in their back pocket.
The implication is that Lester must have wondered why—if he really wanted to be on the side of the good guys in the movies, the ones pasted to stars already—outside the theater he was automatically looked upon by those guys as a threat. And maybe he wondered, if so many black people were trying to straighten their hair to be like the white people to reduce their appearance of threat, did that also not make both his hair and him bad like the bad guys who had bad hair in the movie? Brooks doesn’t say any of this, but a good poem always leads the reader to make connections with what the author wants him to think about.
The strong men have ways to get around to wherever they need to go: they “have their cars beneath them.” Brooks is being funny because at one time cars were called horseless carriages and here she’s calling their horses, cars or their horses, cars. She is also probably making a contrast between the strong/rich people who could afford their own private cars and the weak/poor people who more often had to use public transportation. The ones with cars can go wherever they want whenever they want, but the poor are limited to locations they can reach on foot or to where the trains and buses run.
She says the strong men have no rent (“rentless too”), meaning they have everything taken care of, no recurring worries for the future. She says they are “too broad of chest to shrink when the rough man hails,” meaning that they are so strong and self-confident that, despite the kind of trash talk thrown at them by enemies, it doesn’t affect them at all.
And then she employs a transition that, for two reasons, initially leads the reader to believe she’s still talking about the strong men.
The first reason is her use parallel language (“too broad of chest to shrink” and “too flailing to redirect”), the first referring to strong men; the second, to Lester.
The second reason is more complex. If someone is strong enough to ignore the trash talk of the rough man, then one would think he is strong enough to turn aside an assault from the challenger (“to redirect the Challenger”). But she doesn’t say, “Not too frail to redirect the Challenger” which would continue her contrast of the strong men with Lester. Instead, she says, “Too flailing to redirect the Challenger.”
Flailing is not the purposeful, powerful action of the strong men. Flailing is what happens when someone who can’t swim has been thrown into deep water and is thrashing around with his arms and legs in an attempt to stay afloat—it is desperate, ineffective action. This would be characteristic of Lester.
But she follows this with “Too saddled” which is referring again to the strong men. If someone sits well in the saddle, they are comfortable on their horse or in their situation and can handle themselves. Maybe she’s transitioning between Lester’s description of the strong men and Lester speaking about himself in the first person by making confusing, interpenetrating images to show the confusion Lester himself experiences in trying to sort out the kind of person he wants to be from the kind of person he actually is: He’s coming down from a clear depiction of the fantasy of strong men through a confusing fog where things aren’t clear and finally into the clarity of his limited, despairing life.
The contrast between the fantasy images from movies that give Lester a little relief and the actual situation of Lester’s life is stark.
After Lester’s description of strong men, he flatly states “But I am not like that.” Lester continuously struggles to live (“I pay rent”). Lester gets bullied (“…and am addled by illegible landlords). Lester is cowardly (“run, if robbers call”). Then Lester says that everything he does, compared to the straightforward, heroic actions of the strong men, is something designed to hide himself from trouble, to slip past the attention of predators (like the use camouflage in nature) or enemies. He says that everything he says is something made up to create mental barrier (“to word-wall off that broadness of the dark,” the strength and pervasiveness of evil contrasting with the broad chest of the strong man on horse) to hold back the big dark trouble that threatens to overwhelm him.
The first and the last lines of the poem are also the entire contrast of what lies between them. The strong men live in a big open plain from dawn to sunset. Lester lives surrounded by the dark in a make-believe world (camouflage, mannerisms presented and employed, to word-wall). Brooks starts her poem with “strong men, riding horses” and ends it with “pitiful, I am not brave at all.”
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The poem 'truth' by Gwendolyn Brooks initially appears to be different from Strong Men, Riding Horses in which Brooks talked about the troubles poor people have and how different they are from the big heroes they see at the movies. In that poem the reader can think he sees things about Brooks because her biography says that she grew up on the south side in Chicago as a black girl back in the days when there was more racial discrimination.
But the second poem talks about truth and is something that affects everyone regardless of how much money they have or the color of their skin. She starts out by saying that people are afraid of the truth because they spend so much time living in lies. She uses the sun to represent truth and the shade to represent lies. People sometimes mention "the light of truth" and since most light comes from the sun, it makes sense that she uses the sun to represent truth.
In the second verse she talks about how people, and she includes herself, are always talking about wanting the truth, praying for it, crying for it. But she asks what's going to happen when we actually get what we say that we want. It's not going to be pleasant when the truth comes, because it will be "fierce hammering" by "firm knuckles," like a fist, "hard on the door." The door is the opening to people's lives, and most of that life is carried on in the hidden darkness of their own skulls and, all too often, devised in the darkness of their own hearts.
She says in the third verse that answering that pounding on the door will be too horrible and that we'll run and hide in the darkness of our lies. She calls it the dear thick shelter. She says it is sweet two times. She calls it 'propitious' which means favorable circumstances. She calls the hiding in lies "to sleep in the coolness of snug unawareness." She describes living in lies with words that seem good: dear, shelter, familiar, propitious, sweet, coolness, snug.
She does this to show that people say they want the truth but that they are more comfortable in living a lie because it is easier to believe whatever they want to believe. It's easier because it's all in their heads and not outside of them judging them like the truth. But it still doesn't change what really is.
It's like people telling us when we were kids what we needed to do and how we needed to do it to survive and prosper and why doing some things is really bad. They told us what we could do to stay out of trouble and we said, "Yes, we hear you" but we just went ahead and did everything we shouldn’t have done.
Saying, "Yes, we hear you" is like when Brooks says that we wept and prayed for the truth. It makes us feel like we've done something right while we're still doing something wrong. And that's why, when the truth comes, we aren’t eager to fling open the door for the welcome visit of a dear friend but yearn to stay hiding in the dark with our lies.
She ends the poem with "the dark hangs heavily over the eyes." The eyes are made to see light, to see the truth, but they are blinded by lies. She says that people are living in a way that’s different from how they are supposed to live. She does in this poem what she did in Strong Men, Riding Horses. Her first and last lines of both poems show the big contrast between the ideas in the poems. "Strong men, riding horses/I am not brave at all" shows the difference between strength and powerlessness. "And if the sun comes, how shall we greet him/the dark hangs heavily over the eyes" shows the difference between the action of truth and the blinding of lies.
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Photo by me, Sangre de Cristo Mountains