18 pages • 36 minutes read
Boy Breaking Glass
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Themes
Redefining Art
In “Boy Breaking Glass,” Brooks asks the reader to reframe the vision of a Black child breaking a window as “a cry of art” (Line 1). Accepting that breaking a window may be art requires that the reader reexamine just what art is. A more traditional notion of art is that it is what happens when a person is disciplined enough to master the tools, materials, and history of their craft to create something original. If that is what defines art, people without privileges such as time, space, and money have little chance of becoming artists in the traditional sense.
Brooks rejects that idea of art by redefining art as a form of self-expression and self-representation. When the boy breaks the window, Brooks imagines that he is publicly exposing for all the world to see “his grief” (Line 13) as well as “his loneliness and fidgety revenge” (Line 14). The boy is also engaging in self-representation. Black people and children are frequently objects of art, but in breaking the window, the boy forces any observer of that broken window to see him as an agent capable of reshaping the world around him.
Finally, art may be the creative expression of one’s ideology (system of beliefs). In breaking the window, the boy is rejecting a system that sees him and other residents of the tenement where he grows up as negligible. When the boy “create[s]! If not a note, a hole” (Line 7), he is making himself visible in the materials he has at hand, which are the few windows and rocks around him.
The Role of the Black Artist
Brooks’s reframing of what counts as art inherently critiques the traditional artist. In Lines 16-17—“The only sanity is in a cup of tea. / The only music is in minors”—, Brooks represents the voice of the traditional artist. A world in which a cup of tea is capable of soothing the artist is a comfortable one. Artists in that world can resort to “music in minors [minor key, which is associated with sadness in Western musical traditions]” (Line 17) for self-expression.
Whereas the voice of this traditional artist is sedate, the voice of the boy is urgent, with exclamation points in Lines 7 and 20 as the boy expresses his grievances, his anger, and his fear. Brooks asks the reader to consider that the music may literally be in “minors” (Line 17) like the boy, with that word choice evoking institutions that contain children like the boy through the criminal justice system or other interventions by the state. When the boy breaks glass, he emphatically communicates that he will not accept the meager circumstances of his life and the life of his community.
By communicating an entire worldview with the breaking glass, the boy assumes the role of the artist as proponents of the Black Arts Movement envisioned it. The idealized artist of the Black Arts Movement denounces systematic racism and economic inequality. That artist accurately represents the anger and hopes of Black people, with no worries about whether that representation is respectable enough to allay white fears about the rage of Black people. When Brooks inscribes the voice of the boy breaking glass, she becomes just such an artist.
The Status of the Black Child
During the 1960s and 1970s, the Black child was the object of fear and hope in the United States as the country experienced social change and conservative backlash to those changes. This ambiguity over what role the Black child would play in American society brings tension to the poem.
In popular discourse of the day, Black children, especially those growing up in under-resourced urban communities, were objects of fear, especially for their white neighbors and the legal system. The boy in the poem, who destroys a glass window by throwing an object through it, would have been an archetype of young, Black criminality.
According to this discourse, the boy is a product of a Black family that even liberal sociologists believed to be broken, especially when headed by single Black women. The window—or perhaps the boy himself—is thus “our beautiful flaw and terrible ornament. / Our barbarous and metal little man” (Lines 5-6). This boy can only destroy, and cultural observers believed that boys like this were the product of something inherently pathological within Black families and Black communities.
Brooks allows the Black boy to speak, and in so doing, engages with the tenets of the Black Arts Movement, which held that art by and for Black people was responsible for nurturing a Black revolutionary consciousness capable of destroying a racist system in the United States. From that perspective, the boy is a harbinger of a future that is better than the one he is living in now. At the end of the poem, the boy is in motion—he “runs” (Line 24) out of the frame of the poem before the speaker can fully fix who he is. The cryptic series of things the boy might be on Lines 24-25 leaves unanswered what future the boy symbolizes.
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By Gwendolyn Brooks
