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