Summary
Stanza 1 establishes the physical perspective of the speaker in the context of the general setting established by the title. We know from the final line of this stanza that the speaker and their passengers are driving through Beverly, Chicago, watching the residents walk through their "golden gardens."
Analysis
The fallen leaves are described in the first line as "the dry brown coughing beneath their feet," which personifies the leaves as sickly. The ambiguous language of this first line (the leaves are never called "leaves") and the description of the leaves as brown lends a double valence to the image, particularly in the context of the greater project of Annie Allen, that perhaps Beverly residents feel that non-white people are beneath them, i.e. "beneath their feet."
The parenthetical text in the second line communicates that the residents of Beverly do not perform labor and cannot be bothered to help themselves. They cannot even be bothered to rake their own leaves. The first stanza also introduces the motif of gold in the piece in the third line, "These people walk their golden gardens." Gold has the obvious connotation of wealth and value, but there is also a visual quality to gold that, in the course of the poem, becomes associated with the neighborhood. Their gardens, their thresholds, and even their troubles emanate the glow of gold.
