Wingfoot Lake

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1986

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Historical Context

“Wingfoot Lake” engages with multiple decades of American history, but does so through the lens of “Independence Day, 1964,” just two days after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law. At this time, America was in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968), which sought to abolish disenfranchisement, discrimination, and racial segregation. While the Civil Rights Movement resulted in legislative reform and the end of institutionalized racial segregation, it also embodied ideas and notions that made the youth-based movement at odds with the older generations. This generational conflict is best represented by Beulah’s struggle with the term “Afro-Americans” (Line 25).

It is also important to note that Dove, who would have been 11 years old during “Independence Day, 1964,” wrote the poem in the mid-1980s—over 20 years after the poem’s setting. Dove not only has the benefit of hindsight regarding the outcome of the Civil Rights Movement, but of the struggles people faced in actualizing those outcomes. Less than two weeks after Independence Day of 1964, a 15-year-old Black boy named James Powell was shot and killed in Harlem. This event marked the beginning of the urban uprising, or the “long, hot summer” of race-related protests and riots that exploded across 12 northern cities and persisted until 1967.

Authorial Context

Thomas and Beulah is Dove’s attempt to represent her maternal grandparents’ life and struggles in early-20th-century Ohio. The collection’s account of Dove’s grandparents is partially fictionalized, and there are many aspects of Dove’s own biography that bleed into the historical narratives. Dove’s blending of past and present brings the past forward to engage with contemporary concerns. This bringing of the past forward is particularly prevalent in the poems that chronicle Dove’s grandparent’s later years, such as “Wingfoot Lake.”

The poem’s setting on “Wingfoot Lake” is particularly important in this regard. Though Dove’s mother is not named in the poem, her father, Ray Dove, worked for Goodyear, the company that owned Wingfoot Lake. Ray Dove, then, is the “husband” whose “company picnic” Beulah attends in the poem (Line 9). As explored further in the sections of this guide dedicated to the poem’s themes and symbols, “Wingfoot Lake” suggests a move away from the racial and class-based segregation that Beulah experienced growing up.

As forms of race-based control were slowly (but not completely) removed in the 1950s and 1960s, forms of corporate control took their place in the late 1970s and 1980s. This kind of corporate control is most clearly foreshadowed in the poem’s last stanza, when Beulah reflects on the absurdity of “a park / under the company symbol” (Lines 35-36), but is also seen in how “Heinz” (Line 12) and “Salem potato chip bags” (Line 13) represent a certain middle-class lifestyle at the picnic.