Sterling Allen Brown introducing Slim in Hell

Sterling A. Brown via Kentake Page

The Library of Congress has audio of Sterling Allen Brown reading his poems with comment in the Recording Laboratory, July 9, 1973:

https://www.loc.gov/item/94838831/

Contents 

From Southern road : Odyssey of Big Boy ; Long gone ; Checkers ; After winter ; Sister Lou ; Old man buzzard ; Ma Rainey -- Puttin' on dog -- Sporting Beasley (from Southern road) -- Slim in hell -- Old Lem -- Break of day -- Bitter fruit of the tree -- An old woman remembers -- Ballad of Joe Meek -- Strong men (from Southern road).

Transcribed by me below, Brown's great introduction to Slim in Hell which starts around 31:00:

One of my favorite characters is The Great Liar. In folk life of course the Great Liar is the Mark Twain yarn-spinner. To be called a great liar is a great praise. For instance I'm one of the greatest liars at Howard University, and that would include the President and the Board of Trustees and many of the faculty meetings. Ralph Bunche was a great liar. E. Franklin Frazier was a great liar. I imagine there's some great liars at other schools but I don't know them as well as I do Howard University. I'm sure there's some great liars in Congress. For instance I imagine that Senator Ervin is a great liar. This is an American type and in Negro life it's especially a noticeable type. And so I had a barbershop liar named Slim Greer and that was his actual name. He never lived long enough to sue me for royalties but I did not write this about him.

I wrote this poem in a class at Harvard in Anglo-Saxon where we were reading about Orpheus and Eurydice; now I know that's not an Anglo-Saxon story, but this was a group of stories that scholars prepared for us to learn the language before we started reading Beowulf. Now that's a long introduction. The only thing classical about it is that the dog in it is Cerberus. But I imagine, since Orpheus went to Hell, I imagine that my great tale-teller Slim Greer went to Hell. So I will now give you without any more exegesis or exodus or hell whatever they call it I will now give you Slim in Hell.... 

https://www.loc.gov/item/94838831/?

"Slim in Hell" is in The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown, edited by Michael S. Harper; reissued in 2020 by Northwestern University Press with a new foreword by Cornelius Eady and contributions from James Johnson and Sterling Stuckey. 

Harper mentions Brown's expertise on Twain and Melville, and many other literary subjects, about five minutes into this 1994 conversation with Roland Flint on the poetry of Sterling Brown:

 

At 14:15 Harper reads "Slim in Hell."

Related posts:

• Sterling Allen Brown on Benito Cereno
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2020/10/sterling-allen-brown-on-benito-cereno.html

• Sops for hell-hounds in Pierre
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2020/05/sops-for-hell-hounds-in-pierre.html

Sops for hell-hounds in PIERRE

Aeneas and the Sibyl in the Underworld
Arnold Houbraken (1660–1719) via The Metropolitan Museum of Art

This post aims to help readers achieve a better grasp of metaphorical language in Herman Melville's seventh book, Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities (New York, 1852). The need for such help may be seen in a few misleading footnotes for the 2017 Norton Critical Edition, edited by Robert S. Levine and Cindy Weinstein, that occasionally miss the boat, so to speak. Students, take heart. Faulty footnotes like the one on steamers as clams, discussed in a previous post, show that even highly trained professionals have trouble understanding what Melville wrote.

Another bit of editorial misdirection occurs in Book 25 (Lucy, Isabel, and Pierre. Pierre at His Book. Enceladus) at pages 331-2 of the NCE. Context: Pierre is a struggling author, having fled to the Big City with his pretend-wife (and alleged half-sister) Isabel, along with their farmgirl-friend Delly. Out of the blue, Pierre's angelical ex-fiancée Lucy Tartan has joined them. Lucy's brother Fred and her rejected suitor Glen Stanly have attempted one intervention already, a failure. Since Fred and Glen vowed "swift retribution," Pierre has every reason to expect intolerable public shaming of some kind, either a violent physical attack or a lawsuit. Granting the noble "manliness" of his sworn enemies, Pierre figures correctly that legal action will not satisfy Fred and Glen as "gentlemen of spirit":

... so invincible is the natural, untamable, latent spirit of a courageous manliness in man, that though now socially educated for thousands of years in an arbitrary homage to the Law, as the one only appointed redress for every injured person; yet immemorially and universally, among all gentlemen of spirit, once to have uttered independent personal threats of personal vengeance against your foe, and then, after that, to fall back slinking into a court, and hire with sops a pack of yelping pettifoggers to fight the battle so valiantly proclaimed; this, on the surface, is ever deemed very decorous, and very prudent—a most wise second thought; but, at bottom, a miserably ignoble thing.

 https://books.google.com/books?id=JXK7HN62EcQC&pg=PA457&lpg=PA457&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false

The NCE editors rightly gloss Melville's word pettifoggers as "Inferior or disreputable lawyers" but mistakenly equate sops with "fools." In context, the plural noun sops can't mean "fools." Fops are fools, and saps, but sops are what you might pay lowlife lawyers with. Grose's 1785 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue defines SOP as

"a bribe. A sop for Cerberus, a bribe for a porter, turnkey, or gaoler."

https://books.google.com/books?id=LXMKAAAAIAAJ&pg=RA18-PA7&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false

In a word, sop means bribe. Literally a piece of bread soaked in liquor, sop by extension may designate "anything given to pacify" according to Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language:

"SOP, sop, n. s. what is sopped; any thing steeped in liquor, commonly to be eaten; any thing given to pacify, from the sop given to Cerberus."

Webster likewise invokes Cerberus, the monstrous three-headed dog that guards Hades:

 SOP, n.

... Any thing given to pacify; so called from the sop given to Cerberus, in mythology.

--A Dictionary of the English Language Volume 2 (London, 1832). 

In the best dictionaries of Melville's day, the word "sops" itself calls out Cerberus. In Book 6 of The Aeneid, the Sybil of Cumae pacifies Cerberus with drugged honey-cake. Dryden translates:

The prudent Sibyl had before prepar'd
A sop, in honey steep'd, to charm the guard;
Which, mix'd with pow'rful drugs, she cast before
His greedy grinning jaws, just op'd to roar.
With three enormous mouths he gapes; and straight,
With hunger press'd, devours the pleasing bait.

In Pierre, Melville extends the allusion to Cerberus with an image of hungry curs, seemingly primed for attack. Literally a team of legal hacks, Melville's "pettifoggers" are depicted in figurative language as an aggressive "pack" of "yelping" animals--paid off like Virgil's Cerberus, in "sops." Signifying, in this context, bribes.

Metaphorically then, Melville represents unscrupulous lawyers as dogs or Hounds of Hades. To sic litigious hell-hounds on Pierre would be the prudent way of exacting revenge. "We'll see you in court." However, as Pierre rightly calculates, his cousin Glendinning Stanly and Frederic Tartan are too noble for that course of action. Instead the cousins meet in the street, with tragic results you can read about in the Norton Critical Edition; the 1852 first edition; the 1949 Hendricks House edition; the 1971 Northwestern-Newberrry Edition; or Hershel Parker's Kraken Edition (Harper Collins, 1995), illustrated by Maurice Sendak.

Related posts

• Clams, boats, and footnotes in Pierre
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2019/05/clams-boats-and-footnotes-in-pierre.html 

• Where Pierre shot Glen Stanly
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2020/05/where-pierre-shot-glen-stanly.html

• Melville's illy
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2019/01/melvilles-illy.html