A Black Man Talks of Reaping

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism and death.

The poem is an allegory, so it contains meaning that isn’t explicit. The poem emphasizes sowing and reaping, but it isn’t just about the struggles of farming. The diction is figurative, so the words represent the greater struggles of Black people to benefit from their work and provide their progeny with useful wealth. The speaker’s experience serves as a broader metaphor for systemic racial injustice, particularly the historical and economic structures that have continually exploited Black labor. At the same time, the poem is about agriculture. Due to the United States’ system of slavery, many Black people were forced to plant and grow crops with little to no compensation. Once slavery in the US nominally ended, many Black people, due to overtly racist laws and policies, had to continue working in the fields—labor, like sharecropping, that didn’t provide long-term benefits. This cycle of disenfranchisement meant that Black families often remained trapped in economic precarity despite their labor, mirroring the poem’s central theme of unfulfilled effort. With the allegorical genre, Bontemps uses a common occupation held by Black people to confront the extensive hardships of Black people living in a continually racist society.