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

The primary theme encountered in Brooks’s “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters” is racially-motivated violence; specifically, Brooks poetically analyzes the role of white women and patriarchal culture in the deaths of Black people. The poem responds specifically to the murder of Emmett Till, but rather than focus on the grief of the community or Till’s perspective, Brooks decides to focus on the white woman involved. Brooks’s focus on and analysis of the perception of the white woman is unique, and the scope of the poem shifts slightly to encompass not only racism and violence but also the role of white femininity in the cycle of white-on-Black violence.

Brooks sets the poem specifically within what could be considered the “domestic” sphere of the home: the kitchen. The poem’s setting, coupled with the speaker’s attempts to relate the murder of Till to the fantastical setting of a “ballad,” speak to the role of women in society as one of diminished power, fear, and longing. The speaker in the poem longs to be the subject of a romantic ballad, but in reality, she is the excuse given to murder a young boy. The speaker is racked with guilt and disgust for the part she plays in the careless violence of powerful white men, but she is also too afraid to truly fight back. The speaker is culpable in the violence and racism, but she also is placed within patriarchal society in such a way that denies her the freedom to truly fight back. Brooks’s poem grapples with the questions of fault and consent; how much control does the white woman have over the violence perpetrated in her name?

In order to analyze the themes of violence, racism, and gender, Brooks also constructs and systematically deconstructs the ballad form. Ballads, an old and romantic form of poetry, are often associated with Romantic idealism and nostalgia for traditions of old. In “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters,” Brooks’s white protagonist attempts to remove herself from reality and the murder of Emmett Till by casting herself as the damsel in a ballad. However, reality cannot be denied for long, and the speaker is continually thrust back into the domestic sphere of her own kitchen, confronted by her husband’s violence and anger, and left feeling powerless and afraid of the role she plays in her husband’s violence.

The opening stanza of the poem sets up the ballad form as a central theme of the poem; by starting the stanza with the ballad—rather than an introduction to the setting or speaker—Brooks essentially sets the ballad as a key conceptual or structural marker for the poem. The speaker describes the situation she finds herself in—the meeting with, targeting of, and murder of Till as a “ballad” because, she explains,

It had the beat inevitable. It had the blood.

A wildness cut up, and tied in little bunches,

Like the four-line stanzas of the ballads she had never quite

Understood—the ballads they had set her to, in school (Lines 2-5).

Brooks makes several points in this section of the poem; she tells us, figuratively, that a ballad is “wildness / cut up” (Line 3) and that it possesses “the beat inevitable” (Line 2). However, Brooks also gives the reader details about the literal form of a ballad: Most ballads consist of “four-line stanzas” (Line 4). She ends with an assertion and a reminder that the speaker’s understanding of ballads was poor in school, perhaps in an attempt to indicate to the reader that the speaker’s equation of Emmett Till’s murder with a romantic ballad is incorrect; how would the speaker, who professes not to understand ballads, know whether or not the situation was like a ballad?

Although the poem sticks with some of the terminology the speaker assigns to the ballad—namely the use of “Fine Prince” and “Dark Villain” as titles for the speaker’s husband and Emmett Till, the ballad itself falls away and is not mentioned again until the poem’s final stanza: “The last bleak news of the ballad. / The rest of the rugged music. / The last quatrain” (Lines 134-36). The poem culminates with a return to the ballad form, “the last quatrain” of a ballad is typically used to sum up, with power, the end of the narrative of a ballad. At the end of Brooks’s informal “ballad,” the narrative ends with “bleak news” (Line 134) and the “rugged music” stops (Line 135). At the end of “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters,” Brooks has made and unmade a ballad.