19 pages • 38-minute read
A Black Man Talks of Reaping
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Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism.
“Tired” by Langston Hughes (1931)
After meeting in the 1920s, Hughes and Bontemps became lifelong friends and collaborators. Like Bontemps, Hughes continually addressed racism in the United States. In “Tired,” Hughes, too, uses food symbolism. He suggests cutting open the world—as if it were a piece of fruit—so that people can figure out what is wrong with it. Hughes’s speaker claims that the world isn’t “good” (Line 3) or “beautiful” (Line 4), and Bontemps’s speaker would agree, as the Black man uses agriculture to display a grim, exploitative world.
“A Miracle for Breakfast” by Elizabeth Bishop (1937)
Elizabeth Bishop was a 20th-century American poet who spent some of her childhood in Canada. Her poems have a reputation for dense, puzzling imagery, but “A Miracle for Breakfast” contains many of the themes and literary devices of Bontemps’s poem. In Bishop’s poem, a crowd of hungry people wait to receive a crumb from a man on a balcony. The dynamic matches the situation of the Black man, who only reaps what he can hold in his hand—in other words, mere crumbs. Bishop contrasts the tumultuous scene with a predictable form—the sestina. More so, Bishops uses irony, as the “miracle” is a fantasy and doesn’t help the speaker or the hungry people escape their cycle of precarity.
“Children’s Rhymes” by Langston Hughes (1967)
In Bontemps’s poem, the children consume “bitter fruit” (Line 12). In Hughes’s poem “Children’s Rhymes,” a child speaker reveals what the “bitter fruit” sounds like. The Black child is aware that he can’t inherit the same privileges and freedoms as the “white kids” (Line 2). The Black child is aware that he can’t be the president, and what “bugs” (Line 8) him doesn’t annoy the white children. Hughes uses juxtaposition to demonstrate how the Black child and the white child reap different things. The inequality makes the child rightfully angry, placing him in a similar position as the children in Bontemps’s poem.
Further Literary Resources
“A Summer Tragedy” by Arna Bontemps (1931)
One of Bontemps’s most popular works is a short story that focuses on an older married couple. The husband and wife aren’t in great shape, and their bodies and surroundings are breaking down. Their dilapidated circumstances reflect the precarity of the Black man in “A Black Man Talks of Reaping.” Worried about making ends meet on a day-to-day basis, neither the poem’s speaker nor the story’s couple have the resources for self-care. Like the Black man, the husband worked on the farm, and the farm’s owner exploited him and didn’t reward him for his labor.
Frederick Douglass: Slave, Fighter, Freeman by Arna Bontemps (1959)
Bontemps’s biography of Douglass subverts the message of his poem. Douglass was born in the system of slavery, and his mother was an enslaved person. At first, Douglass was an enslaved person in the city. Later, the enslavers sold him to a farm, where Douglass experienced the “wind” and “fowl” (Line 3) in the form of a brutal enslaver. Yet Bontemps’s book about Douglass reveals that people don’t have to pass along the “bitter fruit” (Line 12) of racism. Douglass stood up to the wicked enslaver and, using the Underground Railroad, escaped the system. Douglass became an outspoken abolitionist. In the language of Bontemps’s poem, he began sowing the rhetoric of liberation.
“The Blacker the Berry” by Kendrick Lamar (2015)
Kendrick Lamar is a contemporary rapper who regularly uses his music to address issues regarding race. In “The Blacker the Berry,” Lamar alludes to the 1929 novel of the same name by Wallace Thurman—another writer linked to the Harlem Renaissance. The voice in Lamar’s song is forcefully proud, contrasting with the melancholy Black man in Bontemps’s poem. More so, Lamar upends the fruit symbolism. The song’s fruit isn’t repugnant but delicious, with the song repeating, “The blacker the berry / the sweeter the juice.” Lamar’s positivity suggests that the cycle of racism and precarity isn’t indefinite and doesn’t automatically apply to every Black person.
Listen to Poem
Malcolm X. Gainor reads “A Black Man Talks of Reaping” by Arna Bontemps
In this video, Malcolm X. Gainor, a student at Tuskegee University (a historically Black university in Alabama), reads Bontemps’s poem in the library. Notice how his steady yet somber voice matches the poem’s confident and melancholy tone.
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