Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View
The speaker is the poet herself, Nikki Giovanni. She uses the second-person perspective for most of the poem before switching to the first-person perspective for the final seven lines.
Form and Meter
Free verse within a single self-contained stanza absent any regular meter, rhythm or rhyme scheme.
Metaphors and Similes
The poem’s main metaphor: “Black love is Black wealth” (line 30)
Alliteration and Assonance
Alliteration and assonance combine in the same line to juxtapose a description of Giovanni's parents fighting with the musical quality used to express it: “though they fought a lot” (line 22)
Irony
"childhood remembrances are always a drag / if you’re Black" (lines 1–2). This is an example of verbal irony, where the speaker says one thing but means another. Childhood remembrances are only a drag because of how white people misinterpret the childhoods of Black people who grew up poor, like the speaker. Otherwise, her childhood was actually quite happy.
Genre
Autobiographical free verse
Setting
The neighborhood of Woodlawn (near Cincinnati, Ohio) in the 1940s and 1950s.
Tone
Nostalgic and critical
Protagonist and Antagonist
The protagonist is the speaker, Nikki Giovanni, and the antagonists are the white observers who misrepresent her childhood
Major Conflict
The conflict at the heart of this poem is social misunderstanding. White society cannot fully appreciate the dynamics of Black community and family. As a result, white society misrepresents the speaker's childhood as being terrible due to the poverty she experienced, when she actually had a happy childhood.
Climax
The poem's climax arguably comes in lines 20 through 23, where the speaker acknowledges that she was poor, her parents often fought, and her father drank, but insists that she was unaffected by these struggles.
Foreshadowing
N/A
Understatement
Line 5: "and if you become famous or something." The addition of "or something" to this line understates the degree to which Giovanni achieved success as a poet and did in fact become "famous."
Allusions
Line 15: “the whole family attended meetings about Hollydale." This is an allusion to the planning of a Cincinnati housing development targeted specifically to Black residents.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
N/A
Personification
N/A
Hyperbole
N/A
Onomatopoeia
N/A
