Summary
Stanza 4 zooms in on a particular Beverly resident and describes a domestic scene in her home. Her record player plays a popular jazz love song of the 1940s. The speaker observes that this Beverly resident has no concept of hard, physical labor, but then qualifies the observation by recognizing that affluent people experience suffering too—only, their suffering is of a different nature than the suffering of working-class people. The rich worry about different set of issues than the poor.
Analysis
The fact that this Beverly resident is playing a jazz tune is significant, because jazz music came primarily from the African-American tradition. The music is described as vague and bleating, which in the context of this rich, white person's home, robs jazz of its destabilizing, innovative effect and turns it into barely audible background noise. Here Brooks shows how even unconsciously, the white Beverly residents can undercut African-American culture.
This stanza is the first instance in the poem of Brooks using deflective language around the word "Nobody" or "Not anybody," e.g. "Not that anybody is saying that these people have no trouble." This kind of language is highly verbally ironic, as it usually suggests its opposite. They are not exactly saying that the Beverly residents have no problems, but that is kind of what they are saying. It also plays on the idea that Black people had to be careful about how they spoke about white communities. Brooks' speaker is careful to guide the reader away from the conclusion that they are bitter or especially resentful against the white residents of Beverly, even though their resentment is abundantly clear.
