Being Without My Child

“Being without my child”

In Dudley Randall short poem “Ballard of Birmingham” was mainly about the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. In the short story it talks about a mother and a child, they have a good mother-daughter relationship. The child asks her mother to go downtown, but her mother doesn’t want her to go because of the hoses, guns and jails. She don’t understand that her mother don’t wont her around those type of things. Instead of going out to play the child wanted to go and march the streets of Birmingham. Her mother is afraid what might happen to her out there. She begged her mother several times but the answer didn’t change. She didn’t understand why her mother didn’t want her to go she just wanted to go.

“No, baby, no, you may not go, for the dogs are fierce and wild, and clubs and hoses, guns and jails aren’t good for a little child.”(page857) says the mother. The mother doesn’t want her child out there with those types of things. She tells her child that she can go to the church instead and sing in the children choir. She want her child in the house of God instead and not the streets, she figured her child will be more safe then ever their. The child even tells her mom that she won’t be alone, that other kids will go with her.

As she “combed and brushed her hair, and bathed rose petal sweet, and drawn white gloves on her small brown hands, and white shoes on her feet.”pg. (857)