The White House

To suggest the delicate balance in racist America between genuine opportunity and the hopelessness and frustration inevitable in the realization of the entrenched reality of segregation, the poem uses the image of a “shuttered door of glass” (Line 8). Within the poem’s metaphor, the poet walks down the street, perhaps protesting, perhaps just going to work, and can see inside an imposing white building but is forever denied access to that building. Even the glass door, which provides that access, is shuttered. It is fitted with wooden slats that make seeing inside that much more difficult. Everything about a glass door invites; after all, unlike more conventional wooden doors, a glass door reveals what is inside, completely eliminates any surprise, and in turn makes implicit the welcome-in. The poet uses that sort of invitational dynamic ironically to suggest the hypocrisy of white America.

Certainly, Black people were technically free in a segregated America—slavery had been abolished more than a half century earlier—free to do anything, certainly, but permitted to do very little. That is where the glass door becomes a critical symbol. If the glass door reveals the culture to which Black people are part, the glass door also suggests a formidable barrier to that same culture.