The birth in a narrow room

The poem is less about race or gender and more about the fragile gift of childhood. Except for the poem’s extratextual frame—we know that this poem was the first in a cycle of 11 semi-autobiographical poems that drew from Brooks’s own experiences as a sensitive, introspective Black child coming of age in the Chicago’s working class Bronzeville neighborhoods in the years after World War II, when America was still very much a segregated nation—little in the poem suggests that we are dealing with anything but a tender, imaginative girl.

Her family is impoverished—the house is small (“pinchy” [Line 8]), cluttered with inexpensive objects, lacks indoor plumbing (no indoor toilet, no indoor running water), and has a tiny bug-thick yard scattered with empty cans and jars. This poem takes place before the child understands the dimensions of race. For her, the world is not yet black and white. The tension in the poem is not about race or gender. That slow-motion epiphany will come all too soon. The tension in the poem centers on the world as it is and the world that can be brought to life by the bold energy of the imagination. The tragedy of the poem comes then from the reader’s realization that such a colorful and rich world cannot long survive. The poem argues the (im)potence of the imagination, its power, certainly, but as well its irony. The best thing and the saddest thing about the girl is that she will inevitably find her imagination irrelevant. For now, she is wonderfully a part of her world and wonderfully apart from that other world.

In the opening stanza the poem shares the evolution into awareness that defines the world of the newborn, an awareness neither limited nor defined by race or gender or income bracket. The poem celebrates the stupendous-ness of the newborn who, perhaps a surprise in its conception, is welcomed into the world by some family structure. In keeping with the poem’s restriction to the perception of the newborn, such figures are not identified but are rather faces pressed close to the newborn’s own. The parents are winks, at times happy, at times weary. The stanza captures the roving eye of a newborn, hungrily noting objects although unable to provide any context for them. They are splendidly objects, things that are part of the newborn’s world. The apron, the iron pot, and the twine gift the newborn with indications of a broader and complicated world. The poem uses the upended fruit bowl to suggest that the newborn, now toddler, is reckless, bold, willing to explore, as all toddlers, in a consequence-free environment, ready to take risks, ready to touch everything pretty as the most direct way to understand the world.

The years pass. The newborn “it” evolves into a “she.” She transitions from the generic identity of a newborn into a child, an emerging person, an individual. She has come to understand space, the difference between big and small—she knows the world of her home is physically small, “pinchy” (Line 8), narrow. But within the expansive reach of her imagination, that pinchy world defies that limit. Unlike the toddler, the child is not content to engage the world only through the senses. The child moves beyond curiosity and the easy satisfaction with the shapes, colors, and textures of the world around her. Now she does not merely engage the world around her but rather creates a kind of alternative world designed and controlled by her powerful imagination. In her alternative world, she does not dance, that would suggest the tight, controlled movements defined and contained by music. She prances, suggesting the high kick, confident strut of wild and free horses. She is in a world unto itself—she does not need music.

That world is peopled by gods and fairies, supernatural (or supranatural) folks that reflect her love of stories and the thrilling escape of books. Yes, that immersion in a world of her own creation limits her interactions with others—she is alone in the yard. But the poem does not pity that loneliness, the girl is self-sufficient. She high steps in unchoreographed vitality, passing by her family’s outhouse and water pump and amid all the litter in her yard, old jelly jars and empty fruit cans, and even through clouds of bugs the size of cars. None of it bothers or distracts her, none of it even registers. She has broken free of her narrow world.