A Song In The Front Yard

A SONG IN THE FRONT YARD

BY GWENDOLYN BROOKS

I’ve stayed in the front yard all my life.

I want a peek at the back

Where it’s rough and untended and hungry weed grows.

A girl gets sick of a rose.

I want to go in the back yard now

And maybe down the alley,

To where the charity children play.

I want a good time today.

They do some wonderful things.

They have some wonderful fun.

My mother sneers, but I say it’s fine

How they don’t have to go in at quarter to nine.

My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae

Will grow up to be a bad woman.

That George’ll be taken to Jail soon or late

(On account of last winter he sold our back gate).

But I say it’s fine. Honest, I do.

And I’d like to be a bad woman, too,

And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace

And strut down the streets with paint on my face

In "A Song in the Front Yard" Gwendolyn Brooks captures the rebellious feelings many children and teenagers possess. That want of freedom, the feeling that you can do whatever you want to do. The lines "I want a peek at the back" hint at a playful, whispered conversation, the need to keep her voice down because she knows her mother won't approve. Things that are "bad" or "wrong" (as dictated by parents) are made all the more tempting by parental disapproval. In other words, we all want what we can't have. It's ironic, though, that Brooks talks of playing "where the charity children play" because, even with the idea that we all want what we can't have, who aspires to be with people who are "lower" than them, have less than them? I agree with her underlying theme, but the examples she employs ("wear the brave stockings of night-black lace and strut down the streets with paint on my face") possess connotations that are almost too rebellious, too risque. I'd like to stay out late, break my curfew, but I'm not sure if "I'd like to be a bad woman, too."