The Ballad of Rudolph Reed

“The Ballad of Rudolph Reed” is a narrative poem in which Brooks dramatizes Rudolph Reed’s quest for a home for his family and his tragic demise when racists attack his home and child. She relies on figurative language, imagery, allusion, and word choice to tell the story of Reed’s struggle for equality and justice.

The first stanza serves as an exposition that provides key information about the characters in this narrative poem. Brooks relies on the word “oaken” (Lines 1, 2) and “oakened” (Line 4) to describe the Reeds. Oak leaves are a warm, golden brown, while the wood of the tree is sturdy enough to weather storms and endure even when transformed into furniture. When Brooks describes the Reeds as “oaken” (Lines 1, 2), she is using an implied metaphor—an implied comparison between two unlike things—to describe both their race and their character.

Reed’s children “[o]akened as they grew” (Line 4). The subtle implication in those descriptors is that these children shared with their father an experience of race that required great moral character to bear; the children are forced to toughen up in a world of racism. These difficult experiences notwithstanding, the Reed girls and boy are “good” (Line 3), meaning they are innocent. The central conflict in ballads is almost always between clear good and obvious evil. By labeling the Reed children as “good” (Line 3), Brooks is making clear that the Reeds are the sympathetic protagonists of the story.

In the next four stanzas, Brooks develops the theme of The Importance of Family and Home by introducing the voice of Rudolph Reed. Reed articulates the dream that motivates him—he wants a good home for his family. Brooks repeats the word “hungry” (Lines 5-8) to emphasize that desire for a home is a fundamental one that goes to the core of who Rudolph Reed is. His hunger for an adequate home is a universal theme, given that safe shelter, along with air and water, are necessary for survival. The Reeds have a home, but it is inadequate. Brooks relies on figurative language to describe the reality of this impoverished home. She personifies the crumbling plaster as something that “stir[s] as if in pain” (Line 10), while she uses a simile to describe the roaches that are “[f]alling like fat rain” (Line 12). The home where the Reeds live is one that inspires discontent and visceral disgust, which Brooks softens by using figurative language.

Brooks carries over the dour tone of this stanza in the first two lines of the fourth stanza by describing the literal darkness that covers over the Reeds as they attempt to survive in their old housing. Rudolph Reed’s dream is an American one in which there is room for his children to grow, a point Brooks drives home by repeating “room” three times in Lines 15 and 16. If Reed’s children are little oaks, they need room, sunlight, and good, clean rain to grow. In this first section of the poem, Brooks draws imagery from nature to represent the desire for a home to raise one’s children as the most universal thing in the world. Her reliance on figurative language and imagery drawn from the natural world makes it easy to forget that there is a particularity in who gets to have adequate housing.

Starting in the fifth stanza, Brooks relies on allusion and diction to connect that struggle to social justice. The first two lines of that stanza—“Oh my home may have its east of west / Or north or south behind it” (Lines 17-18)—echo the famous first lines of the Black spiritual “You May Bury Me in the East,” a song that describes the Black American longing for freedom in the next life, if not in this one, during a moment when racism and restrictions on Black mobility made life oppressive in the United States. Including the allusion allows Brooks to connect Rudolph Reed’s desire for a home to the Black American dream of racial and economic equality. By moving himself and his family to a good home, no matter where it is, Reed is affirming the worth of his Black family. His willingness “to fight” (Line 20) for that home is foreshadowing that a fight will come. In reality, Responding to Racial Injustice in the Chicago neighborhoods that serve as the setting for many of Brooks’s poems meant Black families had to engage in legal and physical fights to end housing discrimination.

The second section of the poem comprises the sixth through 10th stanzas. The mood shifts to one of foreboding. Brooks still relies on the poetic “oaken” to refer to Rudolph Reed—Reed is “oakener” (Line 23) than other Black people who avoid racial confrontations to gain adequate housing. The neighborhood where the much-desired house resides is “bitter white” (Line 21), meaning it is full to the brim with white people, and they are bitter about the arrival of this Black family. The agent who sells the home to the Reeds is likely white as well, but rather than use poetic diction and nature imagery to characterize him, Brooks uses the term “corroded” (Line 26), a word that conjures up damage and neglected machinery. The agent sells Reed the home and sees Reed’s boldness as a sort of joke that Reed might just be able to pull off against his white neighbors. In addition, Brooks breaks the regular rhythm of the lines (See: Form and Meter) to insert the voice of the agent. For the first time, the reader encounters representation of white people, and they come off poorly in contrast to the Black characters in the poem. The implicit message of the poem is that if the Reeds are good, then self-interested people like the agent and hateful neighbors like those who stand between the Reeds and a good home are the bad.

In Stanzas 8 and 9, Brooks uses poetic diction to describe how the neighbors see this Black family. Reed’s wife and children are “dark little” people (Lines 31, 32) upon whom the angry neighbor spies with a “yawning eye” (Line 33) through slits in the perimeter of the house. “Yawning” (Line 33) in this case means gaping, as in a mouth that is ready to devour one. Using synecdoche (using a part of something to represent the whole)—the eye of the neighbor for their whole body—helps Brooks make the point that the Reeds are hyper-visible and in danger as a result of integrating the neighborhood. The eye that “squeezed into a slit” (Line 34) is just the first breach in the boundary of the home Reed thinks he has created by putting his family in a home with “windows everywhere” (Line 38).

Stanzas 11-16 comprise the last part of the poem. These lines are all about transformation of a dream into a nightmare. There is nature, but it impinges on the home in the form of rocks that dangerous, angry neighbors throw until they wound Reed’s daughter, Mabel. The glass windows that symbolize the air and light that Reed so desired for his children become gaps in the home’s defenses. While in traditional English ballads and other old, popular forms a “silvery ring” (Line 45) is an object of protection and power, this ring is sharp glass that wounds “small Mabel” (Line 47). The cut on Mabel’s face is the end of the dream of creating a safe home.

The ends of traditional ballads almost always tend toward tragedy and the defeat of love and the good. That is exactly what happens in “The Ballad of Rudolph Reed.” Under the pressure of racialized violence, Reed snaps. At the start of the poem, Reed is a dreamer who has a vision of home and the echoes of Black spirituals in his speech. In the last section of the poem, Reed is a “mad thing” (Line 53) whose mouth spits out “stinking” (Line 54) words as he attacks the four men he holds responsible for the assault on his daughter. He dies in the assault, while white assailants who live around him abuse his remains by kicking him and calling him a racial slur.

This is an ignoble end. Brooks uses such brutal detail to make racialized violence vivid to the reader. But then Brooks does an interesting thing to end her poem. The hero is dead, and in a traditional ballad, his lover, mother, or some other desperate female figure might wait in vain for him to return. The final scene in this drama is of a crying child who has learned a lesson about racialized violence and an “oak-eyed mother” (Line 63) who is so stoic that she carries on by dressing her child’s wounds. The child and the mother are well aware that Rudolph Reed is dead, but there is no indication that they’ve fled this knowledge. This ending sends the message that sometimes addressing racial violence isn’t about fighting. It is about enduring.