One foot down, then hop! It's hot.
Good things for the ones that's got.
This first line uses the rules of hopscotch to describe the fast-paced, high-energy work of pursuing wealth and ensuring survival. This immediately raises a question: why bother playing this difficult game? But the second line answers that question, offering a justification that goes unchallenged until the poem's final lines. It insists that, for people who already have good things, more good things will soon arise. This is a somewhat paradoxical statement, implying that only the wealthy can acquire wealth and thus hinting at the futility of "the game," though that futility is not fully described until later.
Cross the line, they count you out.
In hopscotch, a player forfeits the game if their foot lands on or crosses the line. The line therefore can be understood as a reference to the norms, rules, and laws barring Black people from primarily white spaces: rather than earning access to new spaces by crossing these social lines, Angelou implies, Black people are made to suffer or entirely "counted out" as a punishment for transgressing. The line also suggests a degree of restrictiveness within Black culture itself, implying that the Harlem community has internalized some of these external strictures in order to create its own inequalities.
They think I lost. I think I won.
Here, the speaker asserts that self-worth and inner freedom offer one autonomy from racism, despite the persistence of racial inequality in the outside world. The truest form of victory over racism comes from an internal awareness of one's worth, rather than from an ability to successfully navigate racist power structures. This refusal to navigate those power structures comes at a social cost, but that cost is a small price to pay for self-respect and mental autonomy. These two lines stand out in their own stanza, and the final line is written in a meter of its own—eight-syllable iambic tetrameter. Those formal shifts reflect the alternative perspective being offered here, and the more natural-sounding, relaxed meter reveals how much more relaxed the speaker feels after rejecting once-accepted racial norms.
