23 pages • 46 minutes read
Night, Death, Mississippi
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Symbols & Motifs
The Screech-Owl
The poem begins with a single blood-curdling cry, which the old man initially believes is a screech-owl. Within Southern folklore, drawing on the cultures of Latin America as well as Native Americans, the appearance of a screech-owl is a bad omen. It symbolizes, not wisdom as owls are conventionally said to symbolize, but rather the approach of death, often unexpected, often tragic. Indeed, when the old man heads out to the porch he realizes his mistake. The “quavering cry” (Line 1) is no owl; rather it is “one of them” (Line 5), by which he means one of the Black people targeted by the Klan.
The haunted cry against the darkness of the night suggests the futility of the Black men’s howls of pain and their pleas for mercy. The old man understands as he enjoys the screams. There is no one who hears the screams who would be willing to intervene. The sound of the men’s agony is reduced within the old man’s skewered perception as something other than human, a strategy which marks how completely the old man has interdicted any sense of morality or outrage. The anguished cries of men being beaten to death with chains is little more than the screech of an owl. As such, the death foretold by the screech-owl is not only the deaths of the Black men but the moral death of the old man himself. The man’s unresponsiveness and lack of alarm (actually he laughs when he realizes it is not an owl but dying Black men) creates the quiet horror of the poem.
The Messy Chains
The ponderous chains used to beat the Black men during the Klan attack symbolize the enslavement of modern Black people and how completely the mindset of the Deep South dehumanizes Black people and thus eliminates any concern for their suffering.
Unlike a shooting, a comparatively quick and easy method for killing, swinging heavy chains demands a commitment, an extended show of hate, the sort of hate that can be sustained through the sheer effort to heft and swing the heavy chains. The weapon of choice for the attack thus represents the depth of evil and the drive to hate that motivates the Klan. When the boy who participates in the beating returns home, he complains about how tired his arms are from swinging the “big old chains” (Line 27).
Chains, of course, are a symbolic element of slavery itself. The chains echo the image of slaves bound by chains and suggest how little the South has changed, that Black people are still bound in chains, chains of bigotry, hatred, and violence. The son, who returns home from the attack excited and eager to share the story with his father, complains about how the sheer weight of the chains made swinging them difficult, never considering the immorality of what he was doing, only complaining about how difficult swinging the chains proved. The last glimpse of the chains notes how “messy and red” (Line 28) they are, a reference to the grim evidence of the night’s attack, the blood and bits of flesh from where the swung chains hit home. Thus, the heavy (and bloody) chains symbolize the imprisonment of Black people in Hayden’s America as well as the difficult reality of the very real and very human pain that Southern bigots inflicted on Black people with impunity.
The Bloody Shirt
The bloody shirt the boy wears provides grim evidence of what the son has been doing that night, whipping Black people with heavy chains, and, in turn, implicates him in the racist worldview of his own father.
The father’s reaction to the arrival of his son—ignoring entirely the blood on his son’s shirt and offering to share a bottle of liquor to celebrate the boy’s coming of age (“he’s earned him a bottle” [Line 23]—speaks to the depth of the old man’s lack of humanity when it comes to Black people. The boy’s shirt is a mess, presumably, from the spray of blood as each blow of the chain savaged the helpless men, a fact that the father ignores, intent as he is on celebrating his boy’s transition into adulthood.
What is far more disquieting than the father’s lack of interest in the bloody shirt is the reaction of the boy’s mother and, in turn, by his own children. The shirt is just something that needs to be washed, as if it is grimy from farm work. The blood of the dead Black men will be wiped away as if the attack never happened. This erasure-as-history has long been the source of the Klan’s survival: riding under the cover of the darkness of night, wearing white hoods and robes (which here are romanticized as gleaming like moonlight” [Line 12]), Klansmen can never be identified, guaranteeing that their actions, even those as heinous as this night’s bloody beatings, go unpunished and their reign of terror continues, suggested here by the indifference in the children’s eyes over what their father has done. They have been carefully taught the logic of hate, intolerance, and violence; the shirt arouses in them no reaction. Rather, they dutifully help their grandmother clean off the blood, the shirt then good as new. The bloody shirt, easily cleaned by the cooperative effort of the family, suggests then the stability and continuity of a Southern culture of racism, brutality, and violence.
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