This image describes how the juice of the blackberries stained the speaker’s hand “like a printer’s/Or thief’s before a police blotter”; however, this also connotes blackberries with something criminal or shameful. (This comparison may also calls to mind a more innocent image – that of a child playing cops and robbers.) This contrasts with the images used in the final two lines of the first stanza. The speaker states the ground was “consecrated” by the juices of the blackberries. They were made holy and sacred by the same juices which made the speaker a criminal. This is a contradiction that persists throughout every stanza of the entire poem. Purity and innocence are conflated with shame and guilt in order to portray the complex emotions that the speaker feels about his situation as an African American boy – a child who has not been allowed to be a child before he is an African American due to the cultural history of racism in the United
This image describes how the juice of the blackberries stained the speaker’s hand “like a printer’s/Or thief’s before a police blotter”; however, this also connotes blackberries with something criminal or shameful. (This comparison may also calls to mind a more innocent image – that of a child playing cops and robbers.) This contrasts with the images used in the final two lines of the first stanza. The speaker states the ground was “consecrated” by the juices of the blackberries. They were made holy and sacred by the same juices which made the speaker a criminal. This is a contradiction that persists throughout every stanza of the entire poem. Purity and innocence are conflated with shame and guilt in order to portray the complex emotions that the speaker feels about his situation as an African American boy – a child who has not been allowed to be a child before he is an African American due to the cultural history of racism in the United