Ballad of Birmingham (Poem Summary)

Poem Summary

Title

Randall’s title — “Ballad of Birmingham” — immediately creates specific expectations in the mind of the reader about what kind of poem this will be. By calling the poem a ballad, Randall places it within an ancient, and initially oral, folk tradition. Typically stories about events or people that were already known to a general audience, ballads often narrate the lives of social outcasts — outlaws such as Robin Hood — or those alienated from the main centers of power in society — like the poor folk for whom Robin Hood stole. Ballads are always stories, often with tragic endings, and they frequently rely on dialogue to tell their tales. They were originally sung, so we can expect that the poem will be strong, musically. Finally, by noting that it is a ballad about Birmingham, Randall signals to his readers what story he will probably be telling: some aspect of the civil rights struggle in Alabama and the events that took place there.

Lines 1-4

The very first stanza places the reader directly in the mind and voice of one of the characters of this story. Obviously, a child speaks here, because the speaker asks permission to go “downtown” to join those marching with the demonstrators for “freedom” rather than merely going “out to play.” Randall introduces a kind of gentle irony at this point by turning our expectations as to what a child would usually ask permission to do — go outside and play — upside down; we get the feeling that this child’s childhood is very different from what we imagine or tell ourselves childhood is or should be about. The child asks the question with affection — she calls her mother “dear” — so that we understand the relationship between them to be warm and loving.

Lines 5-8

In the next four lines, Randall introduces the second speaker in the poem: the mother. She tells her child — her “baby” as she says — that she can’t go with the marchers because it is too dangerous. Here, Randall incorporates what had become the central televised and photographed images in the American public’s mind of the civil rights struggle in Birmingham; the mother mentions the “fierce and wild” police dogs that were set upon the demonstrators, as well as the billy clubs, fire hoses, guns, and jails that were used to intimidate the marchers. Randall is not concerned here with introducing readers to the actual events that took place in Birmingham; he counts on a general recognition on the part of his readers to understand that when he says “hoses,” he means the tremendously powerful fire hoses that knocked demonstrators down to the streets of the city. He also plays on a strange expectation here; while we generally think of the police and the law — the highest kind of civilized body — as protective of citizens and their rights, the dogs that are extensions of police power are portrayed as savage and linked to whatever lies beyond the borders of law, order, and civilization. Randall also uses the word “ain’t” here to give us a sense that the mother is a less-educated woman, probably a member of the working class, and all the more a realistic and believable figure for that ungrammaticality.

Lines 9-12

The child responds here and tries to persuade her mother to let her go by pointing out that other children will be marching. She likewise explains why they’re marching — “to make our country free.” The speaker in these lines uses a typical ploy to convince her mother to let her do what she wants to; everyone else is doing it, she suggests. But again, because of what she’s asking to do, something so solemn and seemingly unchildlike as promote freedom in America, we are reminded of how this child’s life simply does not fit the myth of innocence we usually associate with childhood. By this point, too, it is apparent that Randall wants us to feel the intimacy and reality of this conversation as well as its immediacy by letting us overhear it as if we were present in the room. Again, Randall counts on his reader’s awareness of the happenings in Birmingham when he refers specifically to the way in which civil rights leaders Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth organized demonstrations composed specifically of younger people.

Lines 13-16

In this stanza, the mother still refuses to let her child go, telling her that she is afraid of the violence that may occur. It is here, in lines 15 and 16, that the poem’s central irony is introduced: while the mother won’t allow her child to march with the demonstrators because she’s afraid of how dangerous it might be, she encourages her to go to “sing in the children’s choir” and “go to church instead,” trusting that the church will be a protected, safe place.

Lines 17-20

In this fifth stanza, Randall offers us narrative description, rather than dialogue, to continue the story. In itself, such a shift sets up some kind of change in the poem’s line of action. The activity described in these lines is all preparatory; the daughter combs her hair, washes herself “rose petal sweet,” and puts on white gloves and white shoes. The action is all lovingly described and, because the “she” of the stanza lacks a clear referent and only ambiguously refers to the daughter rather than the mother, the action described in this section echoes the washing and dressing of the dead that traditionally was a familial and communal preburial ritual, a dressing as tenderly undertaken as is this preparatory washing. Randall’s use of the color white for the little girl’s gloves and shoes has multiple and possibly opposing connotations. On one hand, white is the traditional color of purity and innocence, surely everything we would associate with the kind of sweet child described in this poem. But white also symbolizes an oppressive power for this girl and her mother, and it may be symbolic that both her hands and feet — those limbs with which we write, make things, and literally move in the world — are, in fact, encased in that color, reminding us of the control it has over them.

Lines 21-24

These four lines feel somewhat abrupt and, in fact, act as a kind of warning to the reader that something wrong is now certain to occur. While the mother is comforted by the thought that her child is in “the sacred place,” Randall tells us in no uncertain terms that she will not smile again. The “sacred place” referred to here may also suggest a more expansive sacred place such as heaven; this allows the poem to imagistically foreshadow what will happen at the end of the poem — the child will be killed.

Lines 25-28

The event the poem has had us anticipating finally occurs here in stanza 7. The mother hears “the explosion” that Randall would have expected his reader to understand as a reference to the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Obviously, the mother is afraid and, even before she even knows for certain what has happened to her daughter, fears the worst, her eyes “wet and wild.” She runs through the city, calling for her.

Lines 29-32

In this final stanza, what we have feared would come to pass indeed does. The mother digs through the debris at the bombed church and finds only a shoe belonging to her daughter. The poem’s last two lines are a brief and painful return to dialogue as the mother plaintively and helplessly exclaims that the shoe she holds is indeed her daughter’s, but asks, “baby, where are you?” Randall elaborates on the mother’s fear and grief that he introduced in the previous stanza by using the word “clawed” to indicate the desperate scramble the mother makes at the bomb site to find her child and by addressing the last line of the poem directly to the child, who we now understand is dead. The painful futility of the mother’s actions is apparent in this line. Likewise, Randall skillfully avoids describing a grotesque scene of mangled human remains while hinting at such when he depicts the mother going through the “bits of glass and brick” — small chunks of sturdy building materials that are all that remain of that section of the church — and when the mother finds only the shoe. The shoe, in and of itself, is a powerful image with which to end the poem. It is evocative of the tiny shoes parents bronze as mementoes of their children’s childhoods, but it also reminds us of what the daughter initially asked permission to do — to march in the streets for freedom, an activity that was, sadly and ironically, not the most dangerous thing she could have done that day. The poem leaves us with the understanding that the most dangerous threat to this child’s life was not the demonstrations staged by the freedom marchers, but, instead, the racism those demonstrations nonviolently opposed.

Media Adaptations

• A cassette titled Broadside on Broadway: Seven Poets Read was released in 1970 by Broadside Voices. Dudley Randall, Jerry Whittington, Frenchy Hodges, Sonia Sanchez, Don L. Lee, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks read.