Excerpted from Michael Awkward, “Pipe Man”

This is from a longer, as-yet unpublished work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. To compose this piece, the author immersed himself in Sterling Brown’s writings and interviews, especially “A Son’s Return: Oh Didn’t He Ramble,” from A Son’s Return: Selected Essays of Sterling A. Brown, ed. Mark Sanders, Northeastern University Press, 1996, and Genevieve Ekaete, “Sterling Brown: A Living Legend,” New Directions The Howard University Magazine 1 (Winter, 1974): 5–11. The autographed message was written to the author—then a tongue-tied graduate student—the night before Brown received an honorary doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania

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