The Battle, by Gwendolyn Brooks is a look at some pretty intense domestic violence. In the poem, we see that the narrator is speaking from a third-person perspective of an event in her neighborhood. In fact, she hears it from her mother, who heard it from the landlady of Moe Belle Jackson, the woman who this violence is occurring. What startled me most was not the obvious descriptions of violence towards Moe Belle Jackson by her husband, but the accessibility of such private information throughout the the neighborhood.

Moe Belle Jackson's husband
Whipped her good last night.
Her landlady told my ma they had
A knock-down-drag-out fight.

Something that happens behinds closed doors, I suppose does not stay there long.
This poem seems to be divided by stanzas into three parts: 1.) What happened to Moe Belle, 2.) How the Narrator would deal with the situation, and 3.) How Moe Belle Deals with the situation; in which number two and number three are completely different things.
When the narrator puts herself into the situation, the outcome is violent. For some reason, I think that the narrator of this poem is still very young, because, of their immediate jump to use violence against Moe Bell's husband. She is speaking from an outside point of view, which is extremely different than if one is actually in the situation. It reminds me of the countless accounts of women who have said that they would never, ever let themselves become rape victims, they would fight and kill if they had to, and yet when the day came, they felt powerless. The narrator has all the potential, will power that Moe Belle does not for self preservation, because she is not in the immediate situation.

I like to think
Of how I'd of took a knife
And slashed all of the quickenin'
Out of his lowly life.

Putting herself in the situation, she is wishing in my mind, to be an active part in stopping domestic violence.
When we get to stanza three, we see the way that Moe Belle treats the situation:

But if I know Moe Belle,
Most like, she shed a tear,
And this mornin' it was probably,
"More grits, dear?"

This is a story which obviously has no happy ending, except in my mind, strengthening the narrators resolve to not be one of those victims.
The language in this poem has a pretty big indicator of it's place of origin. When I read it aloud, I could not help but give it an accent, and some of the words and phrases are just sort of place specific in their own way:

Ma.
Whipped her good.
I'd of.
Quickenin'.
Mornin'.
Grits.

All of these words sort of get a twang in your mouth that give you a sense of the south, or of some neighborhood that has that closeness between neighbors, but also that language that is spoke between them. What also interests me is the rhyming words within this poem:

Night, Fight
Knife, Life
Tear, Dear.
These are some pretty powerful words that are absolutely necessary for painting someone's perspective on a certain gruesome event such as this. It's a one sided fight that ends in defeat. The last stanza, although contains no violence, is probably the most hard-hitting of them all, because we see that Moe Belle is taking such a passive response to this egregious act, and that stirs us up even more than violence itself.


Bluey aka. Michaela C. Ellis