Sterling A. Brown’s “Maumee Ruth,” from his 1932 collection *Southern Road*, opens not with grief but with an exhausted decision: “Might as well bury her / And bury her deep.” The speaker does not wail or bargain; she concludes that the deepest kindness left is a deep grave, a decent black dress, and no wish to call the dead woman back. That refusal of sentimentality becomes the poem’s central gesture. It is an elegy for a woman whose life had already used up its consolations.
The dead woman is clearly an old caregiver. She has a “boy that she suckled” and a “baby gal,” yet neither is present for the funeral. The boy is “hiding in city holes / Sniffing the ‘snow,’” while the girl is beyond the reach of news in Harlem, “sodden with gin.” Around her in the rural place she lived, almost no one remains except Maum Sal, whose grief is imagined not as high drama but as raw, cranky absence: “With no one now to scoff / Sal may be lonely.” The poem’s subject, then, is not only death but abandonment. The children who took her nurturing are lost in urban addictions; the community that might have mourned her has scattered north. Her burial becomes a private, nearly unnoticed act.
Brown sets that loneliness into the poem’s shape. The short quatrains move with folk-song spareness, the rhymes usually landing on the second and fourth lines—*deep* and *sleep*, *black* and *back*, *town* and *gown*, *ground* and *sound*. The repetition of “Might as well” gives the poem the quality of a proverb or an old tune, as if the speaker is too tired for anything but acceptance. Black southern speech carries the whole piece: “Nobody be heeding,” “How should he know,” “Maum Sal may miss her.” The slant rhyme of “she only” and “lonely” makes isolation audible. This is not an outside observer’s lament; it is the voice of a community speaking its own hard truth.
The imagery stays deliberately plain and therefore devastating. The “shiny black” and “best gown” are dignity reduced to its last possible form. The line “How rocky was the road / For her wayfaring” borrows the spiritual language of a poor wayfaring stranger and turns it into a literal life story. By calling the funeral preacher’s promise “the lies about / Jordan,” the poem refuses the usual heavenly comfort, not necessarily because the afterlife is false, but because the people it might have consoled never came. What remains is not a vision of reunion in glory but the modest hope that she “sleep sound.” Even the final prayer is stripped down.
What makes “Maumee Ruth” significant is that it turns an old woman’s death into an accusation. Instead of making her a saint or turning the grave into a doorway to paradise, Brown insists that the true scandal is how little her life and death registered. The two city portraits—the boy with cocaine, the daughter with gin—are compressed images of a larger rupture, the human cost of movement from rural cabins to Harlem’s din. The repeated “might as well” is not heartlessness. It is the sound of someone doing the last necessary thing for a woman who deserved far more than she got.