Childhood

Walker’s “Childhood” is a poem written in two stanzas and is 14 lines total in length. Loosely following the sonnet form, the poem follows a slightly different rhyme scheme from traditional English or Petrarchan sonnets. With each line being roughly 10 syllables long, the poem follows an iambic pentameter rhythm. Told through the voice of a speaker looking back on a memory from their childhood, “Childhood” occupies the scene of an old mining town in the South.

The poem opens with a lengthy description of the miners that the speaker remembers seeing walking through town as a child. They are described as “red miners” (Line 1) because of the color of the dust from the mine, a characteristic that permeates the rest of the stanza—and the town. The hills around the mine take on the color (“I saw them come down red hills,” [Line 3]) as do the camps where the miners slept (“their camps / dyed with red dust,” [Lines 3-4]). With this detailed imagery, the speaker sets the scene. Then in Line 4 they provide the name of the mine, “Ishkooda mines,” specifically locating the poem in place: Birmingham, Alabama.

Told through the voice of an adult reflecting on a moment from their youth, “Childhood,” unlike most childhood memories, represents the speaker’s depressed, difficult, and rough childhood. The Ishkooda mines were located in Birmingham’s Red Mountain Park and, like most mining experiences, were fraught with danger, disease, and death. This is evident in the second half of the first stanza when the speaker would see the men emerging from the mine “[n]ight after night” (Line 5). They would be carrying their “dinner buckets” (Line 7), dinner being what traditional Southerners would call lunch, and their words would be “undermined” (Line 8) by their constant “grumbling” (Line 8). The disgruntled nature of the miners illustrates their frustration with their jobs, the poor working conditions, and how exhausted they likely were working all day in the dangerous mines.

Line 9, following the stanza break, represents a shift. The speaker suddenly acknowledges that they too lived in this place just like the miners, as they “also lived in low cotton country” (Line 9). What follows this statement are several more lines of imagery where the speaker describes some moments of beauty “where moonlight hovered over ripe haystacks,” (Line 10), followed by images of poverty and depression, such as “croppers’ rotting shacks” (Line 11). Consistently throughout “Childhood” Walker pairs moments of potential positivity with the difficult reality. As represented in Line 12 “with famine, terror, flood, and plague near by”, this was not a rich, safe, or secure place to be raised. Rather, it was a place plagued.

The poem concludes with the following rhyming couplet: “where sentiment and hatred still held sway / and only bitter land was washed away” (Lines 13-14). These lines indicate that the negative emotions of the people (“hatred” [Line 13]) due to the conditions in which they lived were the predominant emotions. Rather than being “washed away” (Line 14), these emotions held on and persisted. What washed away instead was the “bitter land” (Line 14), which represents the mine that tore up the mountain and left red dust everywhere, permeating everything.