"Mother dear, may I go downtown
Instead of out to play,
And march the streets of Birmingham
In a Freedom March today?"
The poem’s opening lines appear within quotation marks, indicating they are spoken dialogue. The closed quotation marks following the question mark hint that the next line will not be spoken by the same character and, indeed, it is the mother’s answer which to the daughter’s inquiry which comprises the second stanza. Thus is the structure of the verse set in place: this will be a dialogue between characters. That question asked by the daughter also serves to foreground the conflict of the plot of this narrative verse.
"No baby, no, you may not go
For I fear those guns will fire.
But you may go to church instead
And sing in the children's choir."
After a receiving a no as the answer from the mother in the second stanza, the daughter pushes the issue once more by reminding the mom that she won’t be alone at the Freedom March. Other kids will be going and, besides, it is important: the march will help make the country free. But the mother is still adamant in fourth stanza. She is intensely aware of how civil rights protests often turn out the black participants. Even kids wind up getting cracked over the skull with a police baton, suffering the effects of high-pressure water hose, facing down attack dogs and, of course, having to beat back racist counter-protests. Not wanting to take any of those chances with her daughter, she instead urges her to the safe and protective confines of the local church. It is at this point the nature of the poem as an exercise in cruelly tragic irony begins to sink in for readers with only a basic familiarity with the history of Birmingham and the civil rights movement.
She clawed through bits of glass and brick,
Then lifted out a shoe.
"O, here's the shoe my baby wore,
But, baby, where are you?"
Following the mother’s urging that the child go to the church instead of taking part in the Freedom March, the structure of the poem changes. It is no longer a dialogue. It is now a third-person description of the mother’s actions in the wake of the girl heading off to church. Her smile at the image of her daughter safe and sound in a sacred place turns to look of shock and desperation at the sound of the explosion. The poem’s final imagery and dialogue conveys all the tragic irony of this story based upon the historical events of what occurred September 15, 1963 when a bomb went off at a Birmingham church, brutally killing four young girls.
