Night, Death, Mississippi

To expose the danger of the vicious brutality of the Klan mentality that defined the Deep South of his time, Hayden examines racism as a kind of family narrative, hate passed one generation to the next like some virus.

The focus here is not on the actual beating of the Black men—that happens, as it were, off stage. We hear only their agonized screams, see only the bloody shirt. The poem rather examines how the violent attack going on within earshot defines and even bonds the family. The poem offers three generations of the South—the elderly couple, their son, and his children—each one by dint of failing to react with any level of horror or outrage complicit in the Klan’s brutality. That brutality, in turn, creates the white Southern community, forges its identity across multiple generations. The old man wishes he could be with his brother Klansmen and join them in the beating; the boy cannot wait to return home and share his night’s attack with his approving, even proud, decidedly non-judgmental parents; and the children dutifully help sponge the blood from the father’s shirt, clean it up, as it were, good as new and ready for the next night raid.