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A Street in Bronzeville, 1945

The forty poems in this section are mostly individual portraits of people who live in Bronzeville, Brooks's name for a neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. In poems like "The Murder" and "Patent Leather," Brooks rejects romantic notions of struggle and triumph, while avoiding the tricky territory of labeling and classification. "Matthew Cole" gives readers a spare portrait of a sixty-six-year-old man growing old alone in a tenement flat: "He never will be done / With dust and his ceiling that / Is everlasting sad." The characters portrayed in the poems are realistic, entirely believable in their words, behavior, and experiences. The poet suggests a reverence for all of these perspectives, from the very young and hopeful to the old and resigned.