Childhood

While Walker’s later poems would be classified as civil rights poems (specifically her 1970s collection Prophets for a New Day), “Childhood” was written and published in the 1940s in the years leading up to the civil rights movement. Still, “Childhood” falls within the literary category of African American protest poetry. Following in the footsteps of prominent poets, such as Langston Hughes, Walker’s poems give voice to Black Americans who have struggled. African American protest poetry and literature is defined as the following:

“...the practice within African American literature of bringing redress to the secondary status of [B]lack people, of attempting to achieve the acceptance of [B]lack people into the larger American body politic, of encouraging practitioners of democracy truly to live up to what democratic ideals on American soil mean” (“African American Protest Poetry.” National Humanities Center).

African American protest poetry is a literary tradition rooted in unearthing and sharing the struggles of Black Americans, beginning with slavery. The intention of this literary tradition is “to show inequalities among races and socio-economic groups in America and to encourage a transformation in the society that engenders such inequalities” (“African American Protest Poetry.” National Humanities Center).

While there are various ways of highlighting these inequalities—for example, through slave narratives or by challenging the larger community to recognize these inequalities—Walker’s “Childhood” uses a child’s memory to bring forth the injustices their hometown faced at a particular point in American history. Through this specific memory, Walker’s speaker draws on the poverty, unhealthy working conditions, and unjust treatment of the miners where they were raised. The community was plagued by this mine where the men worked, night and day. Represented primarily through color (“red miners” [Line 1] and “red hills” [Line 3]) and through the description of their working conditions (“dressed raggedly” [Line 2] and “dyed with red dust” [Line 4]), “Childhood” paints a stark picture of what life was like in this mining town. While it may not clearly appear like a protest poem, Walker’s “Childhood” clearly describes the unequal life of this town in comparison to other, white towns. Far from abundance and joy, the speaker grew up in a town ravaged by “famine, terror, flood, and plague” (Line 12). Through the speaker’s memory, “Childhood” forces the reader to confront an uncomfortable scene of struggle and hard life in this Black community.