Brooks’ “Negro Hero”

“I loved. And a man will guard when he loves./ Their white gowned democracy was my fair lady./ With her knife lying cold, straight, in the softness of her sweet-flowing sleeve.”

Dorie Miller was a real war hero. Played by Cuba Gooding, Jr., he even makes an appearance as perhaps the best part of the terrible film Pearl Harbor. Undertrained and un-respected, Officer’s Cook Miller stood on the deck of a battleship and shot down a Japanese Zero during the attack on Pearl Harbor. After another three years of service as a cook, Miller died at sea. The Navy’s treatment of Miller was contentiously debated during the war. As a hero, he was sent on war bond tours, but when sent back to the front, it was as a cook rather than as a commissioned officer (like at least one similar white Pearl Harbor hero). Brooks poem “Negro Hero” assumes such knowledge. Or perhaps not. Maybe she really is writing about Jesus ;)

Brooks ends the later poem “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock” with the line “The loveliest lynchee was our Lord.” And in “the white troops had their orders but the Negroes looked like men” from Gay Chaps at the Bar, Brooks recounts the ridiculousness of trying to separate the war-dead bodies by race before burial: “These Negroes looked like men.” “Negro Hero” predates these works, but the special question of identity faced by “Negroes” during World War II and afterwards is perhaps best examined in this homage to Dorie Miller wherein Brooks connects him with Christ.

Much like a woman or, more pointedly perhaps, a gay man, the hero of the poem must break military law in order to fight the enemy of Democracy. He is glad that he “gave glory,” otherwise he would have been crucified as a black man overstepping his boundaries. Now they praise him; “They are not concerned that it was hardly The Enemy my fight was against/ But them.” The hero is not fighting for the white men who judge his actions; instead, he’s fighting for democracy herself – and finding her knife in his back for his efforts. “Still – am I good enough to die for them, is my blood bright enough to be spilled,” was his question.

Brooks answer:

(In a southern city a white man said

Indeed I’d rather be dead;

Indeed, I’d rather be shot in the head

Or ridden to waste of the back of a flood

Than saved by the drop of a black man’s blood.)

For the hero here, “the important thing is, I help to save them, them and a part of their democracy.” But is that the important thing? Isn’t it, in fact, perhaps more important that his identity. Like the Navajo Code Talkers on Iwo Jima or the Pima Indian Ira Hayes who helped raise the flag there, Miller is considered both an enemy of the U. S. and a hero. Such a split identity is difficult to maintain. How can he fight for the very idea of democracy which he is denied. Like Christ, the hero Miller has to judge himself. He is the only one who can really determine if his sacrifice for democracy is worthy the cost. “And I am feeling well and settled in myself because I believe it was a good job.” Here the hero shows that only his personal judgment can matter in a world where no outside judgment makes moral sense. But the hero ends the poem still worried about the souls of those he saved: would they really prefer the preservation of their prejudiced hatred “To the continuation of their creed/ And their lives”?

What Brooks gives us with the hero is an example of a character who must define his own morality. Like Roth’s Ozzie, the hero is good. He asks the questions that make it clear he knows what “good” means. However, like Ozzie, he will be damned by those outside his experience. Such damning is similar to that of Blanche DuBois or Maggie the Cat in Williams’ plays. Not to bring Nietzsche in here, but these characters really do exist in narratives which go beyond any clear notions of good and evil. In such a world, only the individual can decide morality.