A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon

Brooks’s “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters” explores racial violence and complicity; it considers, through the eyes of a white woman, the interconnected issues of gender relations, sexuality, southern culture, violence, and racism. “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters” is Brooks’s response to the brutal 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy who spoke to a married white woman in Mississippi and subsequently lost his life at the hands of white men from the community. (For a thorough explanation of Emmett Till’s murder, as well as the socio-political ramifications, see the “Chapter 1 | The Murder of Emmett Till” video clip from the PBS documentary in the Further Reading section of this guide.) Brooks uses archetypal fantasy characters and literary allusions to romance and ballads in order to demonstrate the absurdity of the white speaker’s flawed worldview. “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters” is built upon Brooks’s allusion to the literary ballad form, and that allusion is central to the poem’s conceit. The ironic comparison between the fantastical characters of the ballad and the realities of Emmett Till’s brutal murder highlight, with nuance, the speaker’s complicity in racial violence, as well as her diminished role in patriarchal society.

The poem opens with an introduction to the ballad and the fantastical characters associated with the form. Ballads are often romantic in nature and are associated with the Romantic literary movement of the late-18th century. However, despite the references to romantic ballads, “she had never quite / Understood—the ballads they had set her to, in school” (Lines 4-5). The speaker’s words are also quite dark and speak of violence: “It had the beat inevitable. It had the blood. / A wildness cut up, and tied in little bunches” (Lines 2-3). From the beginning, Brooks is undercutting the fairy-tale language of the ballad with blood and violence, foreshadowing the falseness of the speaker’s perception. Brooks continues to use the ballad form as an allusion throughout the poem, and the speaker uses romantic archetypes to describe herself and other relevant characters: “Herself: the milk-white maid, the “maid mild” / Of the ballad. Pursued / By the Dark Villain. Rescued by the Fine Prince” (Lines 6-8). Here, at the outset of the poem, the speaker gives the reader the three main characters of the ballad: her, the damsel in distress, pursued by a “Dark Villain” and protected by a “Fine Prince.” The speaker’s mindset, her reasons for getting caught up in the fantasy, are clear from the beginning of the poem; she states that it is “good” to be the maid because playing the role “made the breath go fast” (Line 12), implying that the speaker enjoys her role in the fairy-tale she’s concocted. The use of the phrase “breath go fast” (Line 12) also alludes to the speaker’s excitement and enjoyment she feels playing the dangerous role as “maid,” caught between the “Dark Villain” and the “Fine Prince.”

However, Brooks’s “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters” takes many turns, and the first turn it takes comes with the return to reality in the third stanza. The speaker’s “bacon burned” (Line 13) and she returns to real life, where she is cooking breakfast in a kitchen. The change in scene is important here because it divorces the speaker from her fairy-tale role and places her in the role that is true to her place in her society; the speaker is working to serve others, and her work is domestic in nature. Her sphere, or realm, is the domestic kitchen of modern society. Brooks layers another important detail into this stanza—the burning bacon itself, and the speaker’s attempts to “to hide it in the step-on can” (Line 14). The reader learns two things about the speaker from this detail; first, she is careless and is so distracted by fantasy, by the ballad she’s created in her mind, that she accidentally perpetuates a type of violence in her own kitchen by burning (and wasting) bacon meant for breakfast; second, the reader learns by the speaker’s attempts to hide her mistake that she either is unable to face her culpability in burning the bacon, or, perhaps, she is afraid of suffering retribution or punishment for burning the bacon and so feels the need to hide it from someone. The burnt bacon is a metaphor—the first of many that Brooks employs to illustrate the “plight” or the conundrum of white femininity. How culpable is the speaker in the accidental violence she helps commit? Are the speaker’s actions, with the bacon, and also in the murder of Emmett Till, the result of carelessness or willful blindness? Does the white woman’s desire for excitement and romance—an obvious escape from the domestic prison in which she finds herself—lead her to cruelly hurt innocent people in the pursuit of passion? Or is the white female speaker afraid? Are the speaker’s actions purely the result of fear?

Brooks does not give a straightforward answer to these questions; instead, her poem provides a nuanced, realistic view of white femininity. The speaker, a white woman, does not act purely out of malice or fear—instead, it is a dangerous mixture of desire, carelessness, and a need to please in a strict, unfeeling patriarchal society that creates the violent cocktail of blood and death that ultimately ensnares Emmett Till.

The remainder of the poem works to deconstruct the ballad form and the archetypal characters that the speaker so carefully crafted and casted at the opening of the poem. First, the speaker admits, “there was something about the matter of the Dark Villain. / He should have been older, perhaps” (Lines 18-19). Brooks then begins to lead the speaker through a series of realizations. The trappings of the romantic ballad fall away as the speaker recalls more details of Emmett Till’s murder and the role she played in it: “The fun was disturbed, then all but nullified / When the Dark Villain was a blackish child / Of fourteen” (Lines 25-27). The speaker struggles internally with her feelings of guilt and regret; she “could not remember now what that foe had done / Against her, or if anything had been done” (Lines 44-45). However, the speaker also seems unable to fully recognize her own culpability in the act of violence.

Once Brooks returns the poem’s focus to the domestic sphere, the kitchen, it becomes obvious that the white female speaker is afraid of the “Fine Prince,” her husband, and one of the murderers of Emmett Till: “She said not a word. […] / The fear, / Tying her as with iron” (Lines 105, 107-08). The speaker also says, “She did not scream. […] / But a hatred for him burst into glorious flower, / And its perfume enclasped them—big” (Lines 129, 131-32). This quote, which comes towards the end of Brooks’s poem, is particularly revealing because it establishes two almost contradictory facts: the speaker is afraid of and hates her husband, but she also—in the face of the white man’s continued violence—“did not scream. / She stood there” (Lines 129-30). Like the burnt bacon in the third stanza, the speaker’s actions at this point in the poem are literal and metaphorical. The “Fine Prince,” the violent husband who killed Emmett Till, a young boy, also perpetrates violence against the speaker’s young son. Brooks carefully plants several lines in this section of the poem that illustrate the speaker’s allowance of the violence and failure to speak up or protect the young boys being harmed: “She did not speak. When the Hand / Came down” (Lines 92-94); “She did not scream. / She stood there” (Lines 129-30).

The speaker, the “maid,” the “damsel-in-distress,” is afraid of the “Fine Prince”; she is hemmed in by the rules and restrictions of patriarchal society, but those facts do not excuse her complicity in the violence. Essentially, this is the “last quatrain” (Line 136) of the ballad that Brooks deconstructs in “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters.” The speaker, a white woman, feels guilt and disgust and hatred for the violence against Emmett Till, for the violence white culture perpetrates against young Black people; however, that same woman also continues to play her role in the violence over and over again because she refuses to speak, scream, or stand up for the weak “When the Hand” of the white man comes “down” (Lines 93-94).