The title and first two lines of “Harlem Hopscotch” establish the poem’s setting and its extended metaphor. First, the title locates the poem in Harlem, a historically Black neighborhood in New York City. This lets the reader know that the speaker, and implicitly the addressee, are probably Black Americans living in Harlem at the time the poem was written in 1969. As a direct consequence of systemic racism and segregation, Black Americans have experienced pervasive discrimination and poverty, realities that the poem will go on to explore.
The second word of the title, “Hopscotch,” alludes to a children’s game played throughout the U.S. In the game, the players draw (usually with chalk) a hopscotch court of a series of connected squares; the person playing then has to hop and jump through these squares without stepping over a line. Since it is included in the title, the word suggests that the poem will explore this common children’s game. Yet the combination of “Hopscotch” with “Harlem,” which the alliteration of /h/ sounds emphasizes, suggests that the poem’s subject is not just any ordinary game of hopscotch, but rather what this game means or represents within the community of Harlem.
The first two lines of the poem (“One foot down … that’s got”) develop this idea, as they continue to alternate between allusions to the rules of hopscotch and the realities of life in Harlem. Importantly, these lines also set up the prevailing mode of the poem, as the speaker issues a series of instructions to the person playing, implicitly a Black child.
The first line—“One foot down, then hop! It’s hot”—sounds like rules from a regular game of hopscotch; the speaker is telling the addressee to put one foot on the ground, then jump in the air. Yet the short sentence “It’s hot” at the end of the line creates an immediate sense that there is something difficult involved in this game; the pavement is too hot, the poem suggests, but perhaps also there is a painful reality underfoot, requiring the person playing to keep moving, to not stay still for long.
The alliteration of /h/ sounds in “hop” and “hot” recalls the /h/ sounds in the title, connecting these initial instructions to “hop” with the heat of the ground and Harlem itself.
The second line then rhymes with the first, a rhyme accentuated by the assonant short /aw/ sound of “hop” in line 1. This rhyme sustains the sense of a children’s game, since it sounds like a song that children would sing while playing a game at recess.
Yet the words in the line contradict this; the “rule” the speaker issues, here, is not just any rule from a kid’s game. Rather, it has to do with society as a whole, and a society of “haves” and “have-nots” in which the good things—including healthcare, safe housing, food, a good education— are reserved for those with the wealth to afford them. In a society built on systemic racism, this overwhelmingly means white people.
From the outset, then, the poem makes clear that the game it invokes is not just hopscotch. Rather, the game will function as an extended metaphor for a set of rules about class and race in America, and how Black Americans must try to navigate these rules.