Sample Essay 1: RConsequences of EnslavementS by George H. Willams
George H. Williams
English 210.03
Essay 1
2-7-97
Consequences of Enslavement
"The Ballad Of Birmingham" depressed me when I first read it. I thought it was a pretty straight forward story of a mother who thinks she is making a safe choice for her daughter and, ironically, sends her to her death. However, when I started to critically analyze the poem and started using some ideas from New Criticism, Deconstruction and Ideological Criticism I was able to get a more complete picture of what the poet, Dudley Randall, is saying about the consequences of slavery and maintaining the status quo.
I started thinking as a New Critic and trying to examine the form of the poem. The first thing I noticed about the poem's structure is that it is written metrically in eight four line stanzas with each line alternating from four foot to three foot meter. The only exception to this pattern is line 25 - "For when she heard the explosion." The second noticeable thing is that the second and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme. This doesn't really seem to matter until you start to look at the conflicts occurring within the poem.
When I did start looking at the conflicts occurring here, Deconstruction took over because it's obvious that the conflicts can be expressed as binary oppositions and that these oppositions are all related strongly to the poem's structure. The first four stanzas are a dialogue between a mother and daughter with each stanza representing what the characters are saying. In the first and third lines - the non rhyming four foot lines - the oppositions are juxtaposed from stanza to stanza. When the daughter asks, "Mother dear, may I go downtown" (ln 1) in the first line of the first stanza the daughter is making a choice to participate in a peaceful protest. In the mother's response in the first line of the second stanza, "No, baby, no, you may not go" (ln 5) the mother is denying permission for the daughter to go. This sets up the opposition between choosing and denying. This continues in the third lines of stanzas 1 and 2 where the freedom that is sought through the act of participating in the freedom march is juxtaposed with the possibility of going to jail which is the denial of freedom and in effect slavery. This sets up the opposition between freedom and slavery. In the next two stanzas the first lines again reinforce the choosing/denying opposition but the third lines of each bring in two new oppositions: church/street and safety/danger. These two oppositions are very closely related because the first opposition is symbolic of the second. In our culture and the culture that existed in the poem's setting church is seen as a safe haven that's supposed to be immune to the violence in the outside world. On the other hand, the streets during what were supposed to be peaceful freedom and protest marches were often full of "clubs and hoses, guns and jails" (ln 7) and other types of violence and repression usually perpetrated by the white police and national guardsmen.
Similar oppositions occur in the fifth, sixth and eighth stanzas but the first and third lines in these stanzas oppose each other instead of their counterparts in the other stanzas. The opposition between black and white is the first one in the second half of the poem. That the mother and daughter are black is implied by the fact that the daughter wants to participate in the freedom march. It is not made clear until the poet actually tells us about her "small brown hands" (ln 19) and her "night-dark hair" (ln 17). Line 19 actually contains both halves of the black/white opposition but is more of a representation of white because the girl is covering her blackness with the white gloves.
The first and third lines in the next stanza show us the opposition between joy and sadness and this stanza also gives us an indication that something horrible has happened and that the mother may have made a false assumption about the safety of church and therefore the value that her culture places on it. Later in the eighth stanza as the mother searches desperately "through bits of glass and brick" (ln 29) only to find "the shoe my baby wore" (ln 31) the opposition between searching and finding is revealed.
The only time the poem breaks its pattern of alternating from four foot to three foot lines and the pattern of revealing the oppositions is in the first line of the seventh stanza. The reason for this is not so much to emphasize or de-emphasize the first line so much as it is to call attention to the third line - "She raced through the streets of Birmingham" (ln 27) and to set it off from the two earlier times in the poem when the daughter says "And march the streets of Birmingham" (lns 3 and 11). This is done to show the mother's need to make up for lost time and opportunity. Instead of slowly marching for freedom, like she should have earlier, she now has to race, not only to search for her daughter who is now enslaved under "bits of glass and brick" (ln 29) but also to help her people search for freedom.
Although the daughter's death is never explicitly stated, we know she has not
survived the blast. This presents us with one final opposition - life/death. When all of
the oppositions are considered together the way they line up shows something of the
ideology of the poem:
Black / White
Danger / Safety
Choosing / Denying
Joy / Sadness
Searching / Finding
Freedom / Slavery
Life / Death
What the poet is showing us through the daughter and what happens to her is that the black people of the time wanted to search for freedom, even though the search may have been dangerous because it threatens the status quo that was maintained by the repressive white society of the time. In this poem we see a mother who wants to avoid rocking the boat because it might be dangerous. Instead of fighting the oppression represented by the ideology on the right side of the list of oppositions she embraces them. She then denies her daughter's chance to choose the ideology shown on the left side of the list of oppositions and to search for freedom. She instead sends her daughter to the safety of the church. The mother has mistakenly believed that her culture places the sanctity of the church above a racist act of terrorism. As soon as she removes her daughter's freedom of choice, she perpetuates the institution of slavery and dooms herself to the grief that follows. The daughter on the other hand, allows herself to become enslaved and suffers the inevitable consequence of slavery--death.
There is much more going on here than just the sad story of a young girl's death. Dudley Randall has a lot to say about the nature of slavery and the consequences of allowing yourself to be repressed and enslaved. I also realize now that there is no irony in this poem. By allowing herself to be enslaved, the girl is doomed to die and by allowing herself to perpetuate the repressive white status quo, the mother is doomed to her grief.
Works Cited
Randall, Dudley "Ballad of Birmingham" Approaching Poetry Peter Schakel and Jack Ridl, New York: St. Martins, 1997. 73-74
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