Riot 60 S - Analysis

Fire as a camera flash: the riot turns commerce into a scene

This poem treats the 1960s riot not as a single event to be explained, but as a series of snapshots in which fire becomes a harsh kind of illumination. Angelou’s central move is to show how quickly public anger gets translated into the language of storefronts, inventory, and slogans, and how that translation both reveals and distorts what’s happening. The opening image is almost tender in its attention: YOUR FRIEND CHARLIE pawnshop is a glorious blaze, and the speaker listens as the flames lick and then eat jewelry trays. The diction makes destruction feel intimate and bodily. But what the fire consumes is telling: not heirlooms or family keepsakes, but zircons in red gold alloys, imitation-luxury materials that already carry a whiff of fraud. The riot’s brightness exposes a world where value has been manufactured and fenced off, and the poem’s gaze refuses to look away from that manufacturedness.

Burning goods, burning status: Easter clothes, furs, and the attic

The second tableau keeps the camera on objects, but the objects are loaded with class and aspiration. Easter clothes and stolen furs burn together in the attic, a pairing that collapses respectability and crime into the same smoke. The phrase Easter clothes evokes church, renewal, public presentation; stolen furs evokes a different kind of survival and a different kind of performance. The poem doesn’t sort these neatly into innocence and guilt; instead it shows them as adjacent in the same pressured economy. Even the electronics are given a voice: radios and teevees crackled with static, still plugged in, as if the system keeps running even while it burns. The line only to a racial outlet is one of the poem’s sharpest compressions: electricity becomes a metaphor for access itself. Some people are connected to power and some aren’t, and the riot looks like a violent attempt to rewire the grid.

The horde’s admiration: vengeance masquerading as furniture review

As the poem moves to FRIENDLY FINANCE FURNITURE CO., the tone gets more openly satiric, almost like a grotesque product demonstration in the middle of chaos. The leopard-print sofa with gold legs is described with the parenthetical sales pitch, (which makes into a bed), a detail that lands like a jab: even in the riot’s heat, consumer language persists. When it catches fire, the crowd releases an admiring groan, and then comes the chant aimed at the property system: Absentee landlord followed by you got that shit. The satisfaction is real, but it is also hemmed in by what it can reach. The riot can burn the sofa, the pawnshop, the trays of zircons; it can’t touch the deeper architecture that produced an Absentee landlord in the first place. That’s one of the poem’s key tensions: the blaze feels like agency, yet it is still forced to speak through the objects available to it.

From blaze to wattage: a national grid of pressure

The poem then widens into a kind of electrical map: Lighting: a hundred Watts, followed by Detroit, Newark and New York. That line is both literal and bitterly ironic: the riot becomes a standardized unit, a brightness measured like a lightbulb, cities listed like stations on a circuit. Angelou links that grid of cities to a grid of control. Lives are tied to a policeman's whistle, to a welfare worker's doorbell, to a finger that can press a button, ring, point, accuse, pull a trigger. The tone here is tense and clenched; the poem turns from the spectacle of fire to the constant, smaller humiliations that make the fire make sense. The riot is no longer just an eruption; it is the moment when a lifetime of being “plugged in” to someone else’s power finally overloads.

“Hospitality, southern-style”: the smile that burns

One of the poem’s cruelest turns is its sudden, almost singsong invocation of Hospitality, southern-style, with corn pone grits and you-all smile. The phrase carries the history of politeness used as disguise, warmth used as performance, and the poem places it right next to whole blocks novae. That word, novae, is doing heavy work: the neighborhood becomes a night sky of explosions, brand-new stars made by destruction. The poem doesn’t romanticize this; it makes the beauty feel suspect, like the terrible beauty of something finally visible. Then the law is made newly vulnerable: policemen caught in their brand-new cars. The repetition of brand-new is acid. Newness, usually a promise in American consumer life, becomes a trap and a target.

A chant that slides into a hunt: mockery, speed, and the body

The poem’s last movement grows more frightening because it sounds more like a rhyme. Chugga chugga chigga has the rhythm of a childish train sound, a mock locomotive of violence, followed by git me one nigga. The chant is not simply reported; it is staged so we can hear how quickly a crowd’s energy can become a hunt. It continues with lootin’ n burnin’ and the warning he won't git far, as if the speaker is letting us hear the logic of pursuit: someone will be singled out, and distance will not save him. Here the poem’s earlier images of goods and outlets narrow to the vulnerability of a single body.

From food to ammunition: what gets consumed, and by whom

Angelou then piles up foods that are specific, regional, and brutally physical: Watermelons, grey neckbones, boiling tripe. These aren’t tasteful gourmet items; they’re survival foods, foods of necessity and tradition, and they sit beside the image of a supermarket roastin’ like the noonday sun. The riot makes the supermarket into both kitchen and furnace, a place where commodities turn back into raw heat. But the National Guard arrives, described as nervous with his shiny gun. The shine echoes the earlier gold legs, the red gold alloys; brightness returns, now as weapon. The poem finishes with orders that are as blunt as they are intimate: shoot him in the belly, shoot him while he run. After all the talk of furniture, electronics, and outlets, the final “consumption” is of a person. The riot’s fire and the state’s fire meet in the same place: the human body.

The poem’s hardest contradiction: joy in the blaze, horror in the outcome

What makes the poem so unsettling is that it refuses to keep one clean emotion. There is real exhilaration in a glorious blaze and in the crowd’s admiring groan; there is also disgust at the cheap luxury of zircons and leopard-print upholstery; and there is dread as the chant turns predatory and the gun commands turn explicit. The poem’s tension is that the riot is presented as both revelation and disaster: it exposes the racial “outlet” that has been wired into daily life, yet it also becomes a scene where people can be reduced to a slur and a target. Angelou doesn’t offer a comforting moral; she makes the reader sit inside the glare of it.

A question the poem forces: who gets called “friend” in the first place?

The storefront names keep insisting on intimacy and kindness: YOUR FRIEND CHARLIE, FRIENDLY FINANCE. In the middle of burning, those words look like advertising that has been lying all along. If the only “outlet” is racial, then what kind of friendship is being sold, and to whom? The poem suggests that the riot is, among other things, the moment when the lie of friendliness finally catches fire—and the smoke doesn’t know how to stop at the sign.