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John Hatcher Hayden uses a family of lechers in this poem to illustrate... the possibility of inherited evil becoming diastole, systole, / reflex action. Returning home at night after mutilating Black men, this rural father jovially relates to the mother how it went: Then we beat them, he said, beat them till our arms was tired and the big old chains messy and red. In dehumanized logic, the lyncher analyzes the thrill he experiences from this debased act: Christ, it was better than hunting bear which dont know why you want him dead. The invocation to Christ here ironically recalls the crucifixion, and the whole tone of the narration implies that this sanctioned perversity is, like the mentality at the death camp, a reversal of affirmative conviction and a clear index to the depth of the divers descent into darkness. from From the Auroral Darkness: The Life and Poetry of Robert Hayden.
Copyright? 1984 by John Hatcher. John F. Callahaalmost all representations of actual or aborted lynchings in African American literature show such plans and deeds done at the cost of the humanity of victim and perpetrator alike. A chilling exception is Robert Hayden's " Night Death Mississippi. " Written in the 1950 s, the poem is an arresting work of initiation in which Hayden presents the action from the point of view of the grandfather, father, and young son in a family of apparently neer-do-well white folks. (Subtly, Hayden gives voice to the victims of the lynching violence in the form of anonymous unspoken but perhaps sung lines like " O night, raw head and bloody bones night. " Through such calls to folklore the victims feelings their pain and loss and grief are heard and made visible. ) Nonetheless, Hayden, without comment or explicit judgment, without putting his thumb on any moral scale, presents the lynching participants views with such matter-of-factness as to be terribly believable.
Worst and most convincing of all is the extent to which the element of initiation is realized. By focusing on the lynchers point of view, Hayden gets near the core of how such ritual terror could not only be practiced but handed down to the next generation. All in the household are conditioned to treat the returning lynching father with the reverence due a hero whose words and actions protect the tribe. Hayden's cri de coeur is not polemical but profoundly spiritual; the lynching alluded to is horrifyingly conventional and acceptable to the white family involved. And therefore Hayden's poem interprets lynching as a creation, however terrible, of the human heart. In so doing, he makes his poem a witness that is all at once a condemnation, an exorcism, a purification, and a timeless warning.
For Hayden and African American literature in general, enactments of lynching are not mere obscene vestiges of the past but conscientious reminders of racial terrors dormant but not extinguished from the American heart. From The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Copyright? 1997 by Oxford University Press. Pontheolla T.
Williams " Night, Death, Mississippi" is concerned with interracial male-female relations. Unlike the Sue Ellen poem, however, here the most rigid of the racial taboos has been broken that is, the black man / white woman taboo. " Night, Death, Mississippi" is about the penalty imposed on the black man for breaking this taboo as well as the moral and psychological involvement of the victims executioners. Hayden chooses to avoid the graphic treatment of the lynching victim that he gave in " Figure" ; instead he frames the grisly episode in the imaginings and the physical and psychological responses of an old white man. The cry of a " screech owl" interwoven with what might be the victims outcries introduces the problem of reality vis-? -vis appearance that is not resolved until the last stanza, when " Boy, " whom the old man awaits, returns home from the lynching and " Maw" matter-of-family says to the children: You kids fetch Paw some water now sos he can wash that blood off him.
What motivates Paw and his clan is indicated in Hayden's oblique but telling allusion to William Faulkner's " The Bear. " However, whereas Old Ben is such an admired and loved symbol of the wilderness, of freedom and courage, and of the fruitful earth that Sam Fathers and the McCaslins sham-hunt him for years and destroy him only when he turns on the exploiters of the earth, Hayden's hunters kill their prey out of vengeance and the grisly thrill of blood-letting: Christ, it was better than hunting bear which dont know why you want him dead. The old man, reminiscing about past lynchings that he has been a party to, recalls with pleasure an occasion when they " unlocked... one" a graphic description of the physical emasculation of the victim and plans a macabre celebration: Have us a bottle, Boy and me hes earned him a bottle when he gets home. The poem is Hayden's most devastating attack on lynching as what was, even in the sixties, an integral part of southern society.
The poem reveals how the neo-chivalric elements in southern society and the deep-seated theoretical and pragmatic aspects of lynching have become pervasive a way of life the level of the common redneck who participates in a treasured spectacle that relieves the monotony of his dull and empty life. From Robert Hayden: A Critical Analysis of His Poetry. Copyright? 1987 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
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Research essay sample on African American Literature Point Of View
