Harlem (Symbol)
Harlem is a New York neighborhood, located in upper Manhattan, that has historically been a home to a large and diverse Black community. It is perhaps best-known as the home of the Harlem Renaissance, the artistic movement that saw an explosion of African American art and literature. However, Angelou's poem was written decades after the Harlem Renaissance, and primarily discusses the neighborhood as a site of poverty, racism, and inequality. Thus, in this poem, Harlem becomes symbolic of American racial inequality. By making a specific, defined area the symbol of racial inequality, Angelou creates a grounding effect, offering a concrete representation of a broad and abstract issue.
Hopscotch (Symbol)
Here, hopscotch symbolically represents the challenge of survival in a racist society. The game of hopscotch is usually associated with children, so its symbolic significance here suggests that the trappings of racism are fundamentally childish in many ways. Moreover, hopscotch is a game that operates through creating restrictions. Players must move in highly limited, unnatural ways. Thus, by using hopscotch as a symbol, Angelou hints that Harlem's racially influenced norms are not simply unjust but also arbitrary, restrictive, and uncomfortably unnatural. Angelou's choice to use a children's game as a symbol for life under racism does not necessarily make light of racism. Rather, it highlights the overwhelming reach of racism, suggesting that it can corrupt even playful and childlike realms, while also indicting racial inequality as a ridiculous and immature as well as a harmful force.
The Line (Symbol)
Angelou draws attention to one of hopscotch's rules with the sentence "Cross the line, they count you out." On a literal level, this means that players who step outside of their appointed square on the hopscotch court will lose the game. On a symbolic level, it means that Black people who transgress social boundaries will be excluded from success, at least as success is defined by the dominant (white) culture. Thus, the line symbolizes the unspoken limits on Black people's behavior. It can be thought of as a kind of sub-symbol, embedded within the larger symbol of the hopscotch game: while the game as a whole symbolizes the general strategy of survival for Harlem's residents, the line symbolizes the boundary enforcing and limiting that strategy.
