Night, Death, Mississippi by Robert Hayden

Night, Death, Mississippi

by Robert Hayden

I.

A quavering cry. Screech-owl?

Or one of them?

The old man in his reek

and gauntness laughs —

One of them, I bet —

and turns out the kitchen lamp,

limping to the porch to listen

in the windowless night.

Be there with Boy and the rest

if I was well again.

Time was. Time was.

White robes like moonlight

In the sweetgum dark.

Unbucked that one then

and him squealing bloody Jesus

as we cut it off.

Time was. A cry?

A cry all right.

He hawks and spits,

fevered as by groinfire.

Have us a bottle,

Boy and me —

he’s earned him a bottle —

when he gets home.

II.

Then we beat them, he said,

beat them till our arms was tired

and the big old chains

messy and red.

O Jesus burning on the lily cross

Christ, it was better

than hunting bear

which don’t know why

you want him dead.

O night, rawhead and bloodybones night 

You kids fetch Paw

some water now so’s he

can wash that blood

off him, she said.

O night betrayed by darkness not its own

This poem came to me in Hayden's 1966 Selected Poems collection. It was first published in 1962 in his book A Ballad of Remembrance. These dates are important because it was not that long ago and these things were happening with horrifying regularity at the the time that Hayden wrote this poem (most likely in the 1950s).

Hayden is one of my very favorite poets and this poem continues to astonish and outrage me. Let's look at the nitty-gritty here.

First, this is a persona poem--the speaker is not the poet. There are actually two speakers in this poem, each with his own numbered section. But there are other voices. The second section's italicized lines are the poet, a kind of omniscient speaker who also popped in the first stanza's last 2 lines. In the penultimate stanza, a "she said" is also present.

So we know it is nighttime somewhere in Mississippi from the title. We are told there is a noise, and someone asks, ". . . one of them?" In the next stanza this phrase is repeated as a statement--"One of them, I bet." We don't yet know who the "them" is until the third stanza when the old man takes over the poem as speaker. The last line of that stanza tells us he is a White man, an old man, a member of the KKK, and a member who used to go out in the night and torture and kill "them"--Black men.

The fourth stanza is one of his memories of such a night. It is an awful story; the nonchalance with which it is told makes it more horrifying.

The fifth stanza reverts back to the omniscient speaker and we learn this old man has an STD. There is an irony here that is found is so much racism and other forms of hate. One of the stereotypes used as an excuse to justify the murder of Black men was that they are on the prowl, always seeking sex, and will rape at a moment's notice (even rape White women!).

This, of course, leads to sexually transmitted diseases, children born with all sorts of deformities, and just a general sinful life. And it is the old White man with the STD, a person who probably believes every stereotype.

The last stanza in that section sets up the next speaker--his son, who will have to go out hunting people without him. But the old man plans to reward him by sharing a bottle of some sort of alcohol.

We jump into the second section en media res--the conversation has already been going on. Hayden leaves the who was there, where they met up, etc. to our imagination because it is not important. What is important is that some Black men were doing something--standing around chatting, walking home from a late church meeting, whatever.

As with the fourth stanza in the previous section, the first stanza in this section is detailed enough to be sickening without being so gruesome that readers (at least some like me with a very low tolerance for other beings' pain) would be unable to read on.

Each stanza here is alternated with this omniscient speaker, dropping a bit of religious symbolism here and setting up another irony. Whereas the Black poet writing this poem uses the phrase "O Jesus" in a respectful manner, the White speaker begins the nest stanza with "Christ" as a bit of an exclamation and he does so while describing while killing another human is better to him than killing an animal--because the Black man knows why we want him dead.

As awful as the stanzas with the physical violence are, and the poem is as a whole, this is always where I get queasy reading. The speaker alludes to killing a person and a bear, and in his mind, thre human's knowledge of racism and hatred make the murder of a human the "better" kill. All I can think of is the fear both the human and the animal experience, the absolute terror on top of the physical agony.

And the speaker here (as well as in the first stanza) is some guy. Maybe the town pharmicist. A teacher. A cop. Your neighbor. Your dentist. The guy you went to prom with years ago. The man who yelled a racial slur at you last month but you just ignored him, thinking/hoping he was harmless. This poem is a clear example of Hannah Arendt's Banality of Evil which we have seen, and continue to see, enacted all over the world.

The last stanza introduces another voice, the younger man's wife. She speaks to their children, further forcing us to face the banality, the fact that this family is not hidingthe men's crimes from the children. In fact, it appears the children were sitting there listening to their father tell their grandfather about his activities.

And the mother's concern? He has blood all over him and should really wash up.

With poems like this one, it is difficult to talk about enjoyment. I think it is better to talk about necessity. This poem was and is necessary.

Robert Hayden could have written something to the effect of, "I am a Black man and there is terrible racism and violence and you should know how bad it is." Instead, he dons multiple personas (he was great at persona poems) and gives us a lyric poem--a quick snapshot of just a short time inside a house somewhere in Mississippi. He does not judge or summarize or explain. He does not use facts and figures. (Those are all much more useful in certain kinds of prose, like essays and news reports.) By focusing on these horrible people and letting them speak, he ends up saying more than any lecture.

This is, in my opinion, the toughest thing to do in poetry--write about something that is horrendous and overwhelming and societal in that it affects more than just the poet--and do so in a way that enlightens without scolding. Few can pull it off as well as Robert Hayden.