"With two white roses on her breasts, / White candles at head and feet."
The opening lines commence the imagery that is the foundational irony of the poem. This poem has specifically been given a title that describes the skin pigment of the girl. She is not merely a dead girl, she is a dead girl with dark skin. Thus, within the context of race, she is a young Black girl prepared for burial with white roses and white candles as essential components of the ritualistic ceremony. Expanding the context of race to bring the subject of racism into the discourse, this emphasis on whiteness in conjunction with the girl’s death and preparations for burial is situated as almost unspeakable irony. The juxtaposition implicitly demands an answer to the question of where all this whiteness was while she lived. And if there was no whiteness present to care for her during her life, why should it be present at her death.
"Her mother pawned her wedding ring / To lay her out in white."
The answer to why there is whiteness present at her death is given in the opening lines of the second verse. That her mother went to the extreme of raising the money to purchase the white funeral accoutrements by pawning her own wedding ring is intended to shock, not to increase sympathy. The sympathy already exists; a mother has lost her young daughter. The second stanza is all about the nuance of insinuated subtext rather than the direct meaning of the text as written. Within the context of systemic racism in which white is the color of oppression for Black society, the mother going to such lengths to procure white roses and white candles implicates her as lacking a complete awareness of race relations. The desire of the mother for her daughter to be buried in this way implicitly suggests a mirroring of what she sees. It proposes that the mother sees white society through the lens white society has given her to see them. Which is as something superior which should be emulated. The sacrifice, if only temporary, of the wedding ring by the mother mirrors the sacrifices she has made to support the privilege of white society.
"She’d be so proud she’d dance and sing / To see herself tonight."
The hidden implication in the mother’s fully confident assurance of what her daughter’s reaction would be subtly suggests that she had successfully conveyed her lack of full comprehension of racism to her daughter. Just as the mother had bought into the perception of white society that white society desires of themselves, so had she passed that perception along to the next generation. The irony of the commentary on race relations in this poem is subtle enough to be interpreted in the opposite manner, and the ease with which a reader could do so is part of the point.
