Momma Welfare Roll
Momma Welfare Roll - context Summary
Published in 1978
This poem appears in Maya Angelou's 1978 collection And Still I Rise. It presents a blunt social portrait of a mother diminished by poverty: her body and gestures, her children's rough play, and the family's exposure to theft and bureaucratic indifference. Angelou compresses stigma, economic hardship, and official neglect into a single scene, culminating in the speaker's defiant claim They don't give me welfare. I take it.
The poem functions as a critique of institutional failure and of the moralized judgments often directed at poor Black women.
Her arms semaphore fat triangles, Pudgy hands bunched on layered hips Where bones idle under years of fatback And lima beans. Her jowls shiver in accusation Of crimes cliched by Repetition. Her children, strangers To childhood's toys, play Best the games of darkened doorways, Rooftop tag, and know the slick feel of Other people's property. Too fat to whore, Too mad to work, Searches her dreams for the Lucky sign and walks bare-handed Into a den of bereaucrats for her portion. 'They don't give me welfare. I take it.'
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