Countee Cullen’s poem “A Brown Girl Dead” is comprised of just fifty words separated into two stanzas. It would be a stretch to call it an epic poem. And yet, this immodestly composed and structured poem is truly grand in execution, allowing as it does two completely different interpretations which stand in direct opposition to each other. One interpretation depends upon a sincere acceptance of the text taken at face value. The other requires a much higher degree of critical thought which seeks to find irony within the subtext.
The sincere, text-based reading of the poem results in an analysis that can be termed the optimistic interpretation. To consider this poem an optimistic hope for the future of race of relations requires accepting things exactly as they are presented. In both interpretations, the meaning of the first stanza can only be parsed through the information provided in the final two lines second stanza. In the second stanza, the mother sincerely believes that if her dead little girl were able somehow to see how the mother has laid her out for the funeral ceremony, she would be so overjoyed at the sight that she would dance and sing. If these final two lines are read sincerely, they can only be applied to the mother’s consciousness and if they are applied to the mother’s consciousness, then she has reason to believe that her daughter would be thrilled by the white roses, white candles, and white dress which contrasts with her brown skin. This interpretation can only lead to the equally sincere acceptance that this starkly drawn division of brown and white is intended to symbolize hope for an eventual integration of the races in America.
The much darker, more pessimistic, and profoundly ironic interpretation requires taking the text less at face value. It also requires a significantly different reading of those final two lines. In this ironic version, that final vision of the little girl dancing and singing does not originate from the mother, but from the narrator. And it is by no means an optimistic one, but is, in fact, bitterly sarcastic. In a way, the two contrasting views of the meaning of this poem actually turn on which one of two words are accented. In the optimistic version, the accent would be a robust glorification of the word “proud” in the next to last line. In the ironic version, the word “so” would be hit as hard as possible with bitterly corrosively sarcasm that draws out the sound of the little word for as long as one considers decent.
Therein lies the difference between the two interpretations. The vision of the little girl dancing becomes a patently ironic commentary by the narrator that forces a complete revising of the meaning of the text. If the little girl dancing is ironic, it must mean that she actually is not happy at all with what she sees. And if she is unhappy with what she sees, then the white roses and the white candles and the white dress are not beloved symbols of hope for integration, but hated symbols of white oppression. And if all this whiteness contrasting with her dark skin are symbols of racism, then why has the mother chosen them?
As stated earlier, this darker interpretation requires a deeper level of critical engagement with the poem that seems to penetrate into the subtext rather than relying merely on the surface. If the poem is to be interpreted ironically as a story about a daughter not being happy at all with her mother’s introduction of symbols of oppression, then the only logical conclusion is that the mother—who would hardly have been alone among members of African American society at the time—subscribes to the propaganda of white superiority in at least an abstract philosophical way if not necessarily by actually thinking the white people she actually knew were ideal representatives of this racial superiority.
