Harlem Hopscotch
Harlem Hopscotch
Maya Angelou 1969
Famous for her first novel I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou has also written volumes of poetry. “Harlem Hopscotch” was first published in 1969. On the surface it seems like a simple children’s rhyme. However, upon a careful reading, it is clearly a commentary on the plight of African Americans as members of a society that oppresses and excludes them. With deceptively simple language, Angelou explores the ideas of poverty, race relations, and self perception. “Harlem Hopscotch” creates a reality that is both external and internal, and is a lesson in reading between the lines.
Author Biography
Born on April 4, 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri, Maya Angelou spent most of her childhood in the rural, segregated environment of Stamps, Arkansas, raised by her maternal grandmother after the divorce of her parents. Emerging from a disturbing and oppressive childhood to become a prominent figure in contemporary American literature, Angelou’s quest for self-identity and emotional fulfillment is recounted in several volumes of autobiography, beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which chronicles the author’s life up to age sixteen. As a black girl growing up in a world whose boundaries were set by whites, Angelou learned pride and self-confidence from her grand-mother, but the author’s self-image was shattered when she was raped at the age of eight by her mother’s boyfriend. Angelou was so devastated by the attack that she refused to speak for approximately five years. She finally emerged from her self-imposed silence with the help of a schoolteacher who introduced her to the world’s great literature. The author spent much of her troubled youth fleeing various family problems. She was homeless for a time, worked on and off as a prostitute, and held a variety of jobs in several places as a young adult, changing her name to Maya Angelou when she became a cabaret dancer in her early twenties. Eventually she became an actress, joining the European touring cast of Porgy and Bess, but concern for the welfare of her young son, born when Angelou was just sixteen, eventually brought her back to the United States.
By the time she was thirty, Angelou had made a commitment to becoming a writer. Inspired by her friendship with the distinguished social activist author John Killens, she moved to Brooklyn to be near him and to learn her craft. Through weekly meetings of the Harlem Writers’ Guild she learned to treat her writing seriously. At the same time, Angelou made a commitment to promote black civil rights. The next four volumes of her autobiography—Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981), and All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986)—trace the author’s psychological, spiritual, and political odyssey. Angelou recounts experiences such as encounters with Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., her personal involvement with the civil rights and feminist movements in the United States and in Africa, her developing relationship with her son, and her knowledge of the hardships associated with the lower class of American society. In All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, Angelou describes her four-year stay in Ghana where she worked as a freelance writer and editor.
Angelou’s poetry, which is collected in such volumes as Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie (1971) and And Still I Rise (1976), has also contributed to her reputation and is especially popular among young people. It is particularly noted for its use of short lyrics and jazzy rhythms. Angelou recently directed national attention to humanitarian concerns with her poem “On the Pulse of Morning,” which she recited at the 1993 inauguration of President Bill Clinton.
Poem Text
One foot down, then hop! It’s hot.
Good things for the ones that’s got.
Another jump, now to the left.
Everybody for hisself.
In the air, now both feet down.
Since you black, don’t stick around.
Food is gone, the rent is due,
Curse and cry and then jump two.
All the people out of work,
Hold for three, then twist and jerk.
Cross the line, they count you out.
That’s what hopping’s all about.
Both feet flat, the game is done.
They think I lost. I think I won.
Poem Summary
Lines 1-4
Using the rhythms and simple phrasing of a children’s game, the speaker of this poem introduces some complex ideas about poverty and wealth, work and leisure. In the first line we are learning the rules of this game played on a hot day. Hopping on one foot through the concept of wealth begetting wealth, we learn that even a child knows the truth about the rich and the poor. By the end of the stanza it is made perfectly clear that in this world everyone is looking out for his or her own well-being.
Lines 5-8
Suspended in air or both feet on the ground, if a person is black the only choice is to keep moving, according to the speaker of this poem. The fact that there is no sustenance or shelter available hardly matters at all. Still one must keep working, keep moving through the game even in anger and sorrow.
Lines 9-12
When there is no work, then all people can do is wait. Even the childlike speaker of this poem knows the pain of losing hope, because the “twisting” and “jerking” can also be seen as an inner feeling of worry in addition to the outward motion of the child’s game. Even this cannot be expressed because it is seen as being pushy, going too far or “crossing the line.” Right behavior is not necessarily rewarded, but wrong behavior is most definitely punished. Still, the game goes on.
Lines 13-14
In this closing couplet the speaker closes the game. The game can be seen as a metaphor for a lifetime. The speaker knows that there may be nothing to show for all the work of hopping, but just the effort makes her a winner. She realizes that winning the game is all about perspective, not about what one might collect along the way.
Themes
Identity
This poem is apparently addressed to an Africa-American child in the city, and it gives the reader a sense of both aspects of this personality in the words that it uses. The child aspect is like children everywhere, following a rhyming chant to play the universally known game of hopscotch. The directions—“now to the left,” “Then jump two”—are part of the game, and the simplicity of the directions are the source of the game’s continuing popularity. The fact that this poem specifically describes Africa-American youths in poverty is established in the tide, since Harlem is famous as a poor black community, but its significance is in
Topics for Further Study
- Think of a social situation that seems so simple and childish that it is almost a game. Write a poem that gives step-by-step instructions to playing this game, commenting as you go through the steps.
- Compare this poem to Langston Hughes’s “Harlem,” also included in Poetry for Students. Which poem takes the more optimistic view? What is each poem implying that the reader should do?
- Why do you think Angelou chose to write this poem in dialect, rather than standard English? Do you think this choice of language adds to your appreciation of the poem?
the way the poem stands up to oppression. On the surface, the idea of innocent children playing an innocent game and yet being aware of the poverty and racism that affect them could be seen as a horrifying joke—a cruel contrast that emphasizes the injustice by showing it off next to its opposite. But this poem does not take pity on the young gameplayers: instead, it applauds their ability to stand up to their situation. While others may consider this to be a life of losing, the poem says that children who can face diese circumstances have won. The children did not create the racism and poverty, but it is there—part of their lives—and to ignore it or block it out of dieir game would be to reject a part of who they are. In “Harlem Hopscotch,” truthfulness about identity is valued much more than the idealized fantasy that children’s games often encourage. For centuries, African-Americans were forced into poverty and held there by biased laws and social attitudes, all the while being taught to think of people in poverty as “losers”: the narrator of this poem is telling children to not be ashamed of who they are.
Poverty
The second and fourth lines of this poem raise some harsh economic issues for a children’s game, especially since the game is being played in an impoverished neighborhood. Since the children of Harlem are not “the ones that’s got,” the poem is telling them not to expect good things. The idea expressed in the fourth line appears to contradict the spirit of fun and cooperation that we associate with children’s games, telling the children that this game is run on selfish principles. In fact, what Angelou does here is part of a time-honored tradition of translating the horrors of the adult world into children’s songs. Chants such as “Ring Around The Rosie,” “Lizzy Bordon” and “Jack and Jill” have been linked back to stories of plague and murder.
This poem makes us more aware of the viciousness of poverty by presenting it in a setting of innocence. And it captures the impersonal quality of poverty by presenting it as a simple counting game. Under other circumstances, ideas such as “[f]ood is gone, rent is due” could drive children to nightmarish anxiety about security and the future: this poem renders such frightening ideas meaningless by answering them with “jump two.” Unemployment, often considered to be at crisis levels in the inner city, is handled similarly in lines 9 and 10. In this way, “Harlem Hopscotch” teaches us that poverty may not be good or fair, but it also is not devastating, and can in fact be something like a joke to the people it affects, if they put it into perspective.
Race and Racism
In this poem, Angelou equates blackness with poverty, which, though there is no inherent relationship, was certainly an accurate description of Harlem and other segregated urban areas in 1969. The only place where the poem specifically addresses race is in line 6, with the mysterious command “Since you black, don’t stick around.” The obscurity of this line’s meaning allows it to imply the illogic, the danger, and the firm insistence that characterize racism. As a command in a game, it makes no sense: who, black or white, would “stick around” at one space on the board or field when the whole purpose of the game is to move? It sounds like a racist command: segregationist rules always have specific commands for who should move or not move, and when. On one level, this poem accurately implies the unwritten and senseless social codes that African-Americans were made to follow. In another, broader perspective of looking at life as a big, silly game, racist attitudes are shown to be absurd and unconnected to the reality around them.
Style
“Harlem Hopscotch” is a three stanza poem, with a closing couplet. It uses rhyme to create the singsong feeling of a children’s game. The rhymes at the end of each line are augmented by the use of alliteration, and single or double syllable words. Only two words go beyond this self-imposed limit, and may indicate some importance in terms of concept or imagery. These words are “another” and “everybody,” and they conjure up the image of otherness, and inclusiveness. This free-form structure owes more to the music and oral traditions of the African-American culture than to traditional poetic structures. Angelou’s use of African-American pronunciation draws the reader into a specific world view that is both ironic and complete within itself.
Historical Context
Literary works by people of African descent have always had to approach their subjects from a unique perspective. First of all, it is difficult for the individual to put much distance between their personal experiences and the experiences of the group, mainly because stereotyping has linked the individual’s experience closely to the group. Unlike the characteristics that identify other cultural segments, the distinguishing traits that American society and even our laws have used to identify African descent are mostly physical. Although people have been pushed in this way to identify with the group, the group itself has been missing the cultural history that other ethnic groups have enjoyed. Slavery, which brought Africans into American culture, severed the lines of tradition and custom that most American immigrants continue to observe when they leave their country of origin. It was not until the twentieth century that scholars began to seriously study the culture of African-Americans and to trace cultural practices back to the practices of their countries of origin. As a result of all of this, African-American artists have been forced to identify themselves as belonging to a culture strongly associated with the here-and-now, whose link to the past is carried through abstract patterns and not specific legends.
Maya Angelou is now famous as a poet and playwright and from her five-volume autobiography, but in 1969, when “Harlem Hopscotch” was first published, her artistic accomplishments were mainly in the realms of live performance and journalism.
Compare & Contrast
- 1969: The first person, U.S. astronaut Neil A. Armstrong, walked on the surface of the moon.
1975: Unmanned probe Space Viking 2 landed on the surface of Mars.
1986: The Soviet space station Mir was launched into space to begin a long history of use, abandonment, and reuse.
1990: The U.S. launched the Hubble Telescope, the first optical space telescope in orbit around the earth.
Today: Manned spacecraft seldom leave the Earth’s orbit: long-range probes are sent out automatically.
- 1969: The Chicago police raided the apartment of members of the Black Panther party: the ensuing gunfight killed all of the members of the militant African-American group. Supporters of the group believe that police used too much firepower for the situation, while police supporters point out that the Black Panthers were armed and dangerous.
1993: Agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms stormed the compound of the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas, a religious group that was heavily armed and loyal to a charismatic leader. Seventy cult members died.
1995: The largest act of terrorism on U.S. soil, the bombing of the Muir Federal Building in Oklahoma City, occurred on the two-year anniversary of the Waco standoff.
Today: Security around government offices is tightened on April 19th, the anniversary of the Waco standoff and the Oklahoma bombing.
- 1969: Sesame Street, a program using an urban setting with puppets and live actors to teach preschoolers numbers and letters, was first broadcast on the Public Television System.
Today: Sesame Street is still broadcast.
She had danced professionally and toured with a theatrical company. Touring took her to the African continent, where she stayed for a few years, first in Cairo, editing the newspaper The Arab Observer, and then in Ghana, where she worked for the School of Music and Drama at the University of Ghana and wrote for the Ghanan Times. Upon returning to the United States, she continued to write plays and perform in them, and took up writing poetry. In several interviews after the publication of “Harlem Hopscotch,” Angelou talked about what made the game of hopscotch different for young Africa-American children in Harlem than it was for children all across the world who play the game—its complex rhythm. “Quite often there are allusions made in black American writing,” she explained to television journalist Bill Moyers in a 1973 interview, “there are rhythms set in the writing and counter-rhythms which mean a great deal to blacks.” Two years later, explaining the poem, she said, “But Harlem’s rhythms are a bit different. They’re polyrhythms. So it’s dumdum, dickey-dickey, dum-de-dum-dum. And they’re thinking other thoughts than the kids jumping it on Park Avenue or Pacific Heights.” Polyrhythms—the simultaneous existence of rhythm with counter rhythm in a musical piece—occur frequently and naturally in the music of Africa and are one of the legacies handed down to Africa’s descendants, even when stories and information about the continent were not.
After the end of World War I in 1919, there was a huge migration of African-Americans from the Southern states to the large industrial cities in the North. Racist housing practices almost always forced blacks to live in a narrowly defined section of each town, and racist employment and education policies assured that these areas had high levels of poverty. These pockets of minorities in poverty became known as ghettos. Of all the ghettos in the country, the one in New York City, named Harlem, became most famous. In the 1920s, Harlem was the symbol of the artistic achievements of African-Americans, as the home of the most important black writers and musicians of the day. This artistic movement was known as the Harlem Renaissance, because its emphasis on arts and quantity of artists was reminiscent of the Renaissance in Europe during the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. By the 1960s, however, Harlem’s fame was not as a center of culture, but as a broken-down, crime-ridden hole of poverty.
In the 1950s and 1960s, African-Americans made more gains in U.S. courts than at any period of time since the Reconstruction, which was the period after the Civil War ended. A 1954 Supreme Court ruling in the case of Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decided that segregated schools could not possibly offer fair education to all, and that schools should be integrated “with all deliberate speed”; the 1965 Voting Rights act finally assured that black citizens would not be cheated of their right to vote; the federal government sent troops to Southern states several times to oppose local mobs and even state troopers who tried to stop blacks from exercising their rights. On the other hand, this period was also a time of great frustration for African-Americans, as neither racism nor the social effects of racism disappeared when the laws were changed, and black leaders Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated (in 1965 and 1968, respectively). In the late 1960s this bittersweet mix of good news and bad news evoked different responses. Many ghettos were the scenes of rioting: the most devastating were in Los Angeles’ Watts area in 1965, Detroit and Newark in 1967, and just about everywhere when Dr. King was killed. Another response to continued oppression, which we see in this poem, was to embrace the horrors of the ghetto as being uniquely African-American. Rather than pin its hopes on a future where blacks could be free of poverty and violence, this response focused on the present situation and took pride in the strength of a culture in which even the children could bear the city’s vicious challenges.
Critical Overview
Much of the criticism and comment on Angelou’s body of work still remains attached to her prose, specifically I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. Yet Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘for I Diiie, one of the poetry collections in which “Harlem Hopscotch” was printed, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. “Harlem Hopscotch” appeared in an earlier collection, entitled The Poetry of Maya Angelou in 1969.
These earlier poems, according to Carol E. Neubauer, “contain a certain power, which stems from the strong metric control that finds its way into the terse lines characteristic of her poetry. Not a word is wasted, not a beat lost.” She goes on to say that in “Harlem Hopscotch”: “Life itself has become a brutal game of hopscotch, a series of desperate yet hopeful leaps, landing but never pausing long.” Speaking of her own writing methods to George Plimpton for an interview published in The Paris Review, Angelou said: “Some work flows, and you know, you can catch three days. It’s like ... I think the word in sailing is “scudding”—you know, three days of just scudding. Other days it’s just awful—plodding and backing up, trying to take out all the ands, ifs, tos, fors, buts, wherefores, therefores, howevers; you know, all those.”
Criticism
David Kelly
David Kelly is a freelance writer and instructor at Oakton Community College, Des Plaines, IL, as well as the faculty advisor and cofounder of the creative writing periodical of Oakton Community College. He is currently writing a novel. In the following essay, Kelly discusses the elements of traditional African music to support a claim by Angelou that both her poem “Harlem Hopscotch” and black children who play the game share a similar rhythm.
On several occasions, Maya Angelou has told interviewers that the thing she finds most interesting about her 1969 poem “Harlem Hopscotch” is the way that its rhythm captures the way black children play on the streets of Harlem, pointing out their songs’similarity to the complex rhythms of African songs. The ideas expressed in the poem are, without question, different than the ideas that usually come out when children play hopscotch anywhere in the world. Angelou’s point is that this distinct style is not just a reflection of the world of poverty and prejudice that Harlem children recognize from firsthand experience, but that there are
What Do I Read Next?
- Black Woman Writers At Work, edited by Claudia Tate (1983), is a collection of other writers of Angelou’s generation discussing their influences and theories of how life relates to their work.
- The Complete Poems of Maya Angelou was published in 1994.
- The children in Toni Cade Bambara’s short stories live in the inner city. Her writing always displays insight and humor, particularly the stories in 1960‘s Gorilla, My Love.
- Understanding the New Black Poetry, edited by Stephen Henderson, is a 1972 collection of poets who wrote around the same time that “Harlem Hopscotch,” was published.
- Claude Brown’s 1976 book The Children of Ham is a study of an abandoned tenement building in Harlem in the early 1970s structured as a series of character sketches of the teenagers who live there.
rhythms passed down through African-American culture that affect these children, whether they have any knowledge of history or not. Angelou mentioned to television journalist Bill Moyers that kids in Harlem had a different way of looking at reality than other American children, and that this is revealed in their play. In one sense, it seems almost trite to note that what came first (hundreds of years of cultural experience) will affect what came second (the child). Angelou’s comments recognized the fact that culture is not something that is just studied in books but that it affects us all—just as the poem points out that children are not ignorant of the poverty and racism that surround them.
Before agreeing too readily with Angelou’s idea that African-American children think in a specifically African-American way, scholars have to be aware of the danger that it might actually promote bigotry. For years, there was a stereotype among white Americans that black Americans had “natural rhythm,” meaning that musical talent came naturally to descendants of Africa. The reason for this perception was probably because black entertainers crossed the color line first, before other aspects of African-American society: the very rhythmic complexity that Angelou points out made black music and dancing more rich and interesting to people raised in the European tradition, while segregationists had to necessarily deny the more intellectual accomplishments of blacks in order to justify their segregation. Because whites came in contact with blacks most often through musical entertainment, they assumed that all blacks had the same talent as the ones they were familiar with. This sort of recognition of talent could be accepted as a compliment, except that it turns into a curse when the same thought process is used to assume that a certain social group is naturally suited for physical labor or is intellectually incapable of being responsible with finances. Students should look at history with open eyes and see how each thing effects the thing it precedes, but there is also a great responsibility to beware of the troubles that oversimplification has caused in the past.
With that warning, we can proceed with examining just how an African rhythmic pattern could be familiar to African-American children who have not been taught it, and consider what the significance of this is. The field of study that looks at a group’s musical practices and where they came from is called Ethnomusicology. Like anthropologists, the ethnomusicologist defines a group and then looks for the roots of that culture’s practices and beliefs. While anthropologists study all aspects of a culture as it has evolved—what tools they used, what stories they told, even the body shapes of ancestors millions of years ago—the ethnomusicologist focuses on the culture’s development of music. By “culture” we can mean something as broad as half the world (“Eastern Culture” and “Western Culture”) or as specific as children in Harlem, circa 1969.
The search begins with recognizing the rhythm in “Harlem Hopscotch” about which Angelou was talking. The most obvious sign of complexity is the punctuation within many lines of the poem. This is an indication that these particular lines contain more than one idea each—the traditional schoolyard chant line, such as “London Bridge is falling down” or “Jack and Jill went up the hill,” pushes straight through to the end without the mental twists and turns that we see here. The next most obvious aspect is that all of the lines (if we adjust the word “another”) have seven syllables, which makes it impossible to fit them into the standard 4/4 signature of European music. Other playground chants, including the ones already mentioned, use seven-syllable lines too, but they alternate stressed and unstressed syllables. In this case an odd-numbered line will start and end with a stress, making it easier for the jumper or hopper or dancer to follow the beat: the two lines mentioned above, for instance, have a rhythm of (’-’-’-’), where (’) represents a syllable that is stressed. This is the structure for most of the lines of “Harlem Hopscotch,” but the poem is loose within this dominant pattern, just as it takes liberties with the English sonnet pattern it is molded upon. This poem is truly African-American, in that the polyrhythms of Africa are merged with the love of symmetry and order that America inherited from Europe.
What, readers should wonder at this point, is so African about polyrhythms? It is almost impossible to address this musical question in print, and the reader would be well advised to listen to a recording of African chants and compare their drum beats to those in Western classical music (not nineteenth-or twentieth century popular music, which all shows polyrhythms’ gravitational pull). We can, however, study the circumstances which would make it likely that polyrhythms would have evolved in Africa and then accept the word of ethnomusicologists that it just did. The first thing to consider is the social use of music. Throughout time music has been used by individuals to express their loves and sorrows, and to document important events for future generations. In both Europe and Africa this led to using music for religious ceremonies, but this is where the practices diverged: European religions generally worship one God by paying close attention to one significant person (a rabbi, a priest, a minister, etc.) while African ceremonies recognize several gods and their ceremonies include involvement by just about everybody. It is a Western custom, then, for the group to focus attention toward the composer or conductor or performers, while African customs include more participation. We can see that the purity of just one rhythm would be hard to maintain with more people involved. Even the African ceremonies that were led by a priest or priestess still alternated between the religious leader’s singing and the crowd’s response, adding still more diversity to the proceedings than the Western tradition of observing one focal person. With more participants, the odds increase that a greater variety of rhythms will develop and take hold, becoming part of the ceremony and then part of the tradition.
If it is true that African music has more complex rhythms than European music, that still does not prove that a black child in Harlem is more likely to be in touch with Africa than a white child in Boise, Idaho. As mentioned earlier, American music has almost always favored polyrhythms and absorbed them into the culture, just as Europeans realized that they liked the spices of the Orient in their food and made them part of the recipes. With African stylings so prevalent throughout American popular culture, we have to wonder if Angelou’s statement that a black child would be more likely to use African rhythms is not coming dangerously close to making up some sort of “rhythm gene.” The ethnomusicologist, though, would say that there are social factors that have shaped the structure of African-American society in a different way than European American society. The most obvious factor in African-American history is, of course, slavery: people were ripped out of their historic backgrounds and brought into a completely foreign situation. They did not have their belongings or the freedom to associate with their countrymen, which immigrants usually use to ease the transition into their new society, thus making the new society a little more like home. One of the few things Africans could bring with them was music. We can trace a clear line from the “call-and-response” pattern of African ritual songs and the work songs sung by slaves, and from there to Spirituals, which slaves and exslaves used to express the ideas of Christianity in their own way. If white and black society had merged when slavery ended, there might be just one type of music today, but segregation kept the races separate, both formally, with the Jim Crow laws of the South, and informally, with attitudes in the North that are said to have sometimes shown more hateful intimidation than the South’s laws. Music plays a large part in the identity of a culture; blacks were on this continent for almost three hundred years without being African or being allowed to participate fully as Americans. Therefore, without having to resort to claiming a “natural sense of rhythm,” we can safely say that the child in Harlem is part of a special, separate tradition that goes back for centuries.
Maya Angelou may have been wrong: it could be that a child in Harlem would have sung a playground chant in exactly the same way as children all over America. The words of the poem, though, tell us about the Harlem child’s unique way of seeing the world, and it is a pretty safe guess that a
“Not a word is wasted, not a beat lost. Angelou‘s poetic voice speaks with a sure confidence that dares return to even the most painful memories to capture the first signs of loss or hate.”
particular world-view will express itself in a particular music sensibility. Angelou was writing from her gut experience, not from a study of ethnomusicology, but a good poet’s instinct is valuable precisely for the truths it somehow knows.
Source: David Kelly, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1997.
Carol Weubauer
This essay details the consistent themes of Angelou ‘s poetry, particularly the uplifting and realistic presentation of African American images.
[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]
[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]
Source: Carol Weubauer, “Maya Angelou: Self and a Song of Freedom in the Southern Tradition,” in Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, edited by Tonette Bond Inge, University of Alabama Press, 1990, pp. 131-4.
Sources
Angelou, Maya, “Maya Angelou and George Plimpton,” “The Art of Fiction CXIX: Maya Angelou,” The Paris Review, Vol. 32, No. 116, Fall, 1990, pp. 145-167.
Neubauer, Carol E., “Maya Angelou: Self and a Song of Freedom in the Southern Tradition,” in Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, edited by Tonett Bond Inge, The University of Alabama Press, 1990, pp. 114-42
For Further Study
Colburn, David R., and George E. Pozzetta, “Race, Ethnicity and the Evolution of Political Legitimacy,” in The Sixties: From Memory to History, edited by David Ferber, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. pp. 119-48.
The authors talk about how recognition of an ethnic group’s unique experience raises its collective self-esteem.
Cudjoe, Selwyn R., “Maya Angelou and the Autobiographical Statement,” in Black Women Writers (1950-1980), edited by Mari Evans, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1984.
This essay focuses on Angelou’s numerous volumes of autobiography, but it also gives a good sense of the author’s interest in identity, which is central to understanding this poem.
Eliot, Jeffery M., editor, Conversations With Maya Angelou, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1989.
These interviews are compiled from several sources over a number of years—Angelou stresses the uniquely black rhythm of “Harlem Hopscotch,” several times.