Gwendolyn Brooks: A Perspective of Black Life by Anise Evans*

I've stayed in the front yard all of my life.
I want a peek at the back
Where it's rough and untended and hungry weed grows.
A girl gets sick of a rose (1580).

It is clear that the reference to living in the "front yard" verses the "back yard" is synonymous to living a good or a bad life. The character in the poe views living a "bad" life as being more fun, despite the labels that people like her mother place on such people. She says:

My mother sneers, but I say it's fine
How they [charity children] don't have to go in at quarter to nine
My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae
Will grow up to be a bad woman

But I say it's fine. Honest I do.
And I'd like to be a bad woman too... (1580).

These lines show that the girl is willing to accept the consequences of growing up to be a bad woman, the opposite of what her mother wants her to be. In short, Brooks conveys a simple message in theis poem: that choosing to live a "deviant" lifestyle requires an internal acceptance of the positive and negative consequences.

Moreover, "We Real Cool" conveys a similar message. The characters in the poem or the "pool players" apparently are school drop-outs, who spend their time living in the streets, doing what some people would consider as wasting their lives. However, as in a "song in the front yard," the characters are willing to accept the consequences of their choices. Hortence J. Spillers agrees in her essay written for A LIFE DISTILLED when she writes, "They make no excuses for themselves and apparently inviteno one else to do so. The poem is in their situation as they see it" (225). This acceptance is especially clear by their acknowledgement of their fate for leading such lives:

We real cool. We
Left School. We

Lurk Late. We
Strike strait. We

Sing sin. We
Think gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

The final line of the poem, in which the pool players are willing to suffer the ultimate fate of an early death sends a powerful message. Brooks sums up the whole idea of suffering the consequence of one's choices in life in this one line.

Finally, Brooks makes a similar point in her powm "Sadie and Maud". It would seem as though Maud would be he one

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