Quick and Final Thoughts About "A Bronzeville Mother..."

One more, sorry! Same boat, this one just begged to have more written about it when I was re-reading it for this project.

It's such a haunting poem, to me. It's a ballad/elegy about the woman associated with the Emmett Till case (in which 14 year old Till was murdered for whistling at a white woman). We follow the story of a white American woman caught in a horrible marriage. It starts out with fairy-tale-like imagery (she, the "milk-white maid," Emmett, the "Dark Villain," and her husband, the "Fine Prince"). She says that it's best to be a "maid mild" because the "breath [goes] fast" if you are -- life passes by more smoothly and quickly. As she cooks breakfast in her "perfect" world, burning the bacon and tossing it, and making more, she contemplates her encounter with the Dark Villain. We see as she tries to justify what happened, and watch as small inklings of guilt creep in until it consumes her, with


 "So much had happened, she could not remember now what
 that foe had done
Against her, or if anything had been done.
The one thing in the world that she did know and knew
With terrifying clarity was that her composition
Had disintegrated. That, although the pattern prevailed,
The breaks were everywhere. That she could think
Of no thread capable of the necessary 
Sew-work."

She is suddenly sickened by what had happened. She begins seeing the red of blood everywhere she looks: her child's cheek, her husband's mouth, it metaphorically creeping across her shoulders. She sees the monster her husband is, and as he kisses her,

She did not scream.
She stood there.
But a hatred for him burst into glorious flower,
And its perfume enclasped them-big,
Bigger than all magnolias.