Night, Death, Mississippi

It is certainly a considerable risk: to expose the brutality and hypocrisy of rural Southern racism by allowing to speak the very people who relish such brutality unapologetically and who embody that hypocrisy proudly. The poem provides no moral framework that would suggest a higher authority condemning as vile and evil that brutality. That risk is exponentially increased when the author of the poem is a Black American male who, coming of age in Depression America and then working within the white network of academic America, understood first-hand the implications of the bigotry and racism at the dark heart of mid-20th-century America.

The poem, then, given its subject matter, would seem to call for the rhetoric of moral righteousness. What the family has done is to give license to unspeakable violence and racist horrors. How can a Black man allow this backwoods Southern farm family to speak with such relish about torturing and killing Black people without intruding with moral commentary, without demanding moral corrective. Surely, read without the stinging irony of simply allowing violent and mean-hearted people to reveal themselves by allowing them to speak without intrusive critical commentary, can make the conversation between these family members seem to elevate racist violence, even share the family’s unseemly relish of what the Klan has done that night. But the poem depends on the reader to establish a moral reading. By not reacting with outrage, the poet trusts the reader will. The poem, by compelling the reader to share so directly in the toxic mindset and perspective of racists, reveals at a visceral level the need to rid American culture of such iniquitous thinking.

The first stanza is controlled by an old farmer whose interior monologue reveals his familiarity with the Klan and with their night raids. Without a narrative frame and within the first-person narration, the reader is compelled to get close, really inhabit with increasingly distressing claustrophobic feel the mindset of a vicious bigot (indeed, we even smell his “reek” [Line 3)]. How I wish I could be with them, he says, with my neighbors, my friends, my own son, out there in the darkness wearing their white robes that guarantee impunity and meting out their brand of justice, beating helpless Black men with heavy chains that, as the beatings go on, the Klansmen grow weary of bringing down the bloody and messy chains. The poem keeps the violence itself at a distance—the sounds of the victims’ screams creating a far more vivid picture than any real-time detailing would. But if the screams create horror in the reader, they call to the old man who, despite his bad leg and his weak wheezing lungs, to get out to the porch to hear better the screams of the victims.

The old man’s recollection of once castrating a Black man (a gruesome ritual that speaks to the Mandingo fantasy of the white culture) speaks to the ugly horror of Southern racism, “unbucking” a man not only inflects profound physical torture but as well symbolizes emasculation, rendering the victim impotent and hence no longer a man, no longer able to foster a next generation, no longer a threat. That emasculation is critical in a poem that reveals how carefully taught, one Southern white generation to the next, is the vicious logic of intolerance and the thrill of violence directed against Black people. That logic is revealed in the pride the old man feels for his son, who is tonight participating for the first time in the Klan’s violence. The old man will welcome his son home like a hero and prepares to toast the night’s villainy with his son.

Violence, racism, and hate are therefore part of the community of the Deep South reflected in the poem; in fact, hate is how some white Southerners create an identity and a shared sense of purpose. Since post-bellum America, racism created the history of the white South, suggested by the old man’s fond recollections of castrating a helpless Black man. That idea of passing down hate that legitimizes, even romanticizes violence one generation to the next is ultimately underscored when in the closing lines it is revealed the old man’s grandchildren, presumably the children of the boy who returns home, have been watching the entire scene play out, have seen their own father return home bloodied and flushed with triumph, have seen their grandfather celebrate the night and their grandmother fussing only about laundering their father’s bloodied shirt. What those children do not see, of course, is what the reader is trusted to provide: outrage, moral questioning, disbelief, shock, and horror.

These figures are not characters in the traditional fictional sense—they lack individual motivations, individual behavioral quirks, signature memories rich with idiosyncratic detailing and immediacy. The old man, a retired Klansman, his dutiful Christian wife, his son, introduced tonight to the thrill of violence, and his children, as innocent as they are poisoned, are less characters and more representative figures in the drama of racism in Hayden’s America. They represent the types of people who in a deliberate and self-conscious conspiracy create and perpetuate racism in the Deep South. After all, the strategy of Klan attacks avoids culpability. They ride at night, with no witnesses, no expectation of accountability, and they act collectively. Everyone is guilty, but no one is responsible (suggested in Line 16 when the old man says “we” castrated the man). Even though the old man and his wife and their grandchildren and even perhaps the boy, whose specific actions are never detailed, actually do nothing, they are nevertheless complicit in the deaths of the Black men. The only repercussions the son will face for his participation in the attack is how best to sponge off the blood from his shirt.

The italicized lines offer the poem, otherwise locked within the toxic perceptions of the racist family, a kind of step back, a choral outrage, a perspective that frames the attack within a wider and moral perception. “Jesus burning on the lily cross” (Line 29) suggests how Christianity itself, the religion of the Klan, has been appropriated by these hate groups to justify, even glorify their nefarious work and how, in turn, distant and irrelevant Christ appears to the Black people now suffering in the Deep South. “O night, rawhead and bloodybones night” (Line 34) hymns the reality that the Klan attack is perpetrated under the cloaking cover of raw (as in absolute, unbroken by the symbolic power of light) and bloody night, defined now by the physical torture the Black man endures as he is beaten raw and bloody by the heavy chains. “O night, betrayed by darkness not its own” (Line 39) suggest as dark as the night is physically, what has happened that night is far darker because it is defined by a fathomless evil, providing the poem’s narrative its slender expression of both outrage and helplessness as there is no suggestion here that there will be any repercussions from the beating.