Summary
The poem begins with the speaker telling the reader that "childhood remembrances are always a drag / if you’re Black," meaning that for Black people, it is difficult to recall your childhood. Using the second-person perspective, the speaker goes on to say that when recalling "your" childhood, "you" always remember your home in Woodlawn, Ohio (the town where Giovanni spent part of her childhood). There, your only toilet was outdoors.
The speaker then says that if you become famous, "they"—people who are commenting on your life—always ignore the positive aspects of your childhood. These aspects include your close relationship with your mother and your happy moments, such as the feeling of taking a bath in a big tub—the kind of tub that people in Chicago use to barbecue. When you talk about your childhood, she says, listeners never understand the depth of the connection you felt with your family. Specifically, the speaker mentions your parents' excitement at the prospect of building a home in the Hollydale housing development and the subsequent disappointment your father experienced when he was unable to secure a loan and had to sell his stock there. Your biographers do not understand just how much this human drama affected you.
Next, the speaker says that while you were in fact poor while growing up, "it isn't poverty that / concerns you." Money was not the biggest issue in your life. Your parents did fight a lot, she says, and your father did drink. Yet, what really mattered to you as a child was that you were able to have joyous family gatherings, including birthdays and Christmases. The poem then shifts to the first-person perspective, with the speaker reiterating her hope that "no white person ever has cause / to write about me." She says that white people do not understand that "Black love is Black wealth"—familial love has value just like money. The poem concludes with the speaker summarizing her belief that people commenting on her life will usually focus on the negatives while missing the fact that "all the while I was quite happy."
Analysis
"Nikki-Rosa" is a commentary on how the public perceives and portrays the lives of Black people. Under this reading, the poem's first line is partially ironic: "childhood remembrances" are mostly a "drag" because of outside misrepresentations of one's life. In fact, as we will go on to learn, the speaker, Giovanni, had a happy childhood. This is, therefore, a form of verbal irony, where the speaker says one thing but means another.
The poem utilizes the second-person perspective as a way of making the reader a participant in the narrative. In addressing us, the audience, directly, the speaker forces us to put ourselves in her shoes, promoting empathy and understanding with her difficult position.
In lines three and four, the speaker acknowledges that her family was indeed poor, as they had "no inside toilet." Then, she gets to the crux of her complaint: "and if you become famous or something"—which the speaker, the poet herself, did—people never talk about the good parts of your childhood. She points to her relationship with her mother ("how happy you were to have / your mother / all to yourself") as well as smaller moments, like the feeling of bathing in a barbecue drum. It is important to note here that the speaker does not reference these "big tubs that folk in chicago barbecue in" to elicit pity or to show that her life was hard. In fact, this is actually a perfect example of one of the poem's central meanings: poverty does not necessarily mean sadness.
Yet, childhood was not always happy for the speaker. She insists again that outside observers cannot understand how she felt while growing up, though this time she is referring to the intense empathy she felt when her parents were looking to build a home in the all-Black Hollydale development. The reader understands that despite the speaker's happy memories, her family was probably experiencing some degree of racism when she was a child. Outside sources confirm that her father was denied a loan for the house due to "racist lending practices." That being true, what the public fails to understand is that the speaker's pain in this period was not due directly to poverty or racism itself—it was due to her father's disappointment, his "pain as he sells his stock / and another dream goes." This reveals the depth of her relationship with her family.
Line 20 begins with the poem's only capitalized letter not belonging to a proper noun: "And though you’re poor it isn’t poverty that / concerns you." This is done to emphasize the statement, which is a kind of thesis for the poem as a whole. Not even the speaker's parents' marital problems or her father's drinking gave her a bad childhood. No, as the speaker emphasizes time and time again, all that mattered to her was the love she shared with her family. As she puts it in lines 24 through 26, what matters is "only that everybody is together and you / and your sister have happy birthdays and very good / Christmases."
In line 27, the poem shifts to the first-person perspective, a powerful technique that makes the poem much more personal and urgent. The reader has spent the rest of the poem imagining themselves being misunderstood and misrepresented. The shift back to the first person here drives home the fact that the stories described in "Nikki-Rosa" are the real facts of somebody's life, and it is the speaker is the one who has been misunderstood and misrepresented. All the empathy and understanding that the use of the second person built up is now transferred to the speaker. She writes: "and I really hope no white person ever has cause / to write about me," a fairly straightforward appeal, considering what we now understand about how she feels misrepresented. "Because they never understand / Black love is Black wealth." Here is the fundamental difference in understanding that the speaker perceives between Black and white observers. White people do not understand the value that love has had for the speaker, nor the role that love plays in the wider Black community. According to the speaker, Black love is a form of wealth entirely distinct from literal capital. This explains why poverty did not bother the speaker, and why white people might not understand this: the speaker was actually rich, not poor, as a child, because of the intensity of the love she experienced.
The poem concludes with the speaker summarizing the tension that lies at the heart of "Nikki-Rosa, saying, "they’ll / probably talk about my hard childhood / and never understand that / all the while I was quite happy." This is a powerful argument and a searing criticism of mainstream culture. If, as Giovanni stated in a 1972 interview with Peter Bailey, "An artist's job is to show what he sees," then the last lines of "Nikki-Rosa" are effective in two ways. They reveal what Giovanni sees upon reflecting on her own childhood, which is that "I was quite happy," and they show what she sees about the culture of broader society, which is that white observers generally cannot understand the experiences of Black people.
