Ulysses

By comparing school children to the warriors of The Odyssey [See: Literary Context], Brooks suggests that their world is also filled with violence. Brooks sharply divides the streets of Chicago from the children's homes, as she gives the line describing how they “go into the world” (Line 5) its own stanza. Brooks’s centering of the Black experience reveals the differences for children of color when they leave their homes. Unlike the common assumption that school is a safe place for learning, instead it is a battlefield. In the poem, Black children are depicted like warriors entering a battle, with the students who “bring knives pistols bottles, little boxes, and cans” (Line 10) to school. Education takes second place to the physical danger students feel in the world, and this process repeats every day, with the journey through this treacherous geography continuing day after day. And like Ulysses lost at sea, bouncing from island to island, these children reject the geography their teachers "feed" (Line 13) them, using their own methods to navigate out of this perilous journey.