Black, White, and Red All Over

For fun, to start:

            A search brought up confirmation that magnolias (as mentioned in Line 125) are the state flower of Mississippi. It also provided this poem, which—while lovely in its own right—is a jarring celebration of Southern "simplicity" when read immediately after "Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother burns bacon."

            It's interesting to see the same symbol used to totally different effect(s?), and to me, the lesson underscored Gwendolyn Brooks's total dismantling of any notion of narrative simplicity.

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Now, for the assigned poem.

            I've been struggling to understand the significance of the parallel between the "milk-white maid['s]" (6) application of lipstick (49) and her "Fine Prince['s]" (8) "mouth, wet and red, / So very, very, very red" (114).

            Color obviously plays one of the starring roles in this poem, which was inspired by racial conflict. A simple aggregation of Brooks's color references reveals:

•    The milk-white maid (6)

•    the Dark Villain (8, 18, 25, 38)

•    a blackish child (25)

•    lipstick (49)

•    the blood (53)

•    Negro eyes (54)

•    brown-black--(69)

•    bleeding headlines (75)

•    blood (84)

•    a lengthening red, a red that had no end. (89)

•    Color of the paste in her paste-jar (93).

•    a red ooze (105)

•    her white shoulders (106)

•    wet and red (113)

•    So very, very, very red (114)

            And less overt, but still color-conjuring images of:

•    bacon burned (13)

•    eyes still too young to be dirty (24)

•    day (39)

•    night (108)

•    days and nights (112)

            Does the "milk-white maid" imagine blood over her child's face (89) and blood "seeping, spreading darkly, thickly, slowly" over her own shoulders (105) in a moment that links them with the violence committed by her husband's hands? Is she repulsed by the sight of her husband's "very, very, very red" lips because they look so much like her own? If the last hypothesis is true, then it is telling that the wife has to apply the red lipstick. It is not her natural color; she has to falsely wear it in order to inhabit a (comparatively) safe position in her household/society.

            To state my question more clearly, I wonder if the image of the blood is condemning those over whom it is imaginatively smeared, or if it represents their victimization at the Fine Prince's hands. Perhaps the color red, like the colors of blackness/brownness/darkness, blurs in meaning as the poem progresses.