23 pages • 46 minutes read
Night, Death, Mississippi
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Themes
Racism and the Ku Klux Klan as Cultural Identity
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.
The Klan has provided the postbellum white South with the integrity of its cultural identity, and hence, the poem relies on the reader—outside the toxic cultural environment of the white mid-century Deep South—to provide a moral frame that rejects the definition of a people, any people, with intolerance, bigotry, violence, and racism. The poem ends in despair, the night’s attack is cloaked in a formidable darkness that promises the violence may never be revealed, will in effect remain secret and resist the moral (and criminal) accountability that comes only with transparency. But it is darker than tonight’s attack going unpunished. This violence is the expression of the Deep South culture itself. The children dutifully helping clean their father’s bloody shirt without question, without emotion, ensures the continuation of the Deep South’s identification with racism, violence, and intolerance.
The Brutality and Dehumanization of Racism
In the 1950s, for most of America, segregation was a word, an abstract, a theory of social organization, at times the subject of judicial decisions. At the dark heart of Hayden’s poem is his strategy to make vivid the reality of the violence committed against Black people in a Deep South systemically defined by intolerance and by its willingness to use violence to preserve what it perceived to be a way of life, basically a caste system, that provided its cultural integrity and its social and economic stability.
The poem does not detail the beating deaths the old man ear-witnesses. Because the civil rights movement was fought not just in the streets of the Deep South but on television as well, Americans watched a sanitized version of the reality of what segregation meant. There was only so much network television could show in the age before YouTube and cameras in every phone. Television audiences watched incidents of police brutality, guard dogs and fire hoses turned on peaceful demonstrators, listened to the chilling rhetoric of hate unironically espoused by Southerners for news cameras, but never witnessed the Klan beatings and lynchings.
The media coverage trained for more than a decade on the unfolding drama of the civil rights battle created a new awareness in the American public, certainly, but could not generate the sort of visceral outrage Hayden creates in the images of the chains, the screams in the night, and of course that shirt soaked in blood. Unlike black and white images of streets crowded with protestors, the poem reveals the dimensions of the Klan’s violence through two objects television could never show in the 1960s: the “big old chains,” “messy and red,” (Lines 27 and 28) and the young man’s shirt, bloodied from the attack. These details bring home the reality of the violence of racism. The old man, listening to the screams of the Black victims, is actually aroused by the sounds, “fevered as if by groinfire” (Line 20). By showing the effects of the attack, the reader can conceive the dimensions of the attack itself. And, through such interactive involvement, Hayden’s reader does what the family itself does not do, recoil in horror and outrage over the attack. Much like the criminal trial the Klansmen will never face, the poem presents the evidence of the attack to bring home its reality, shreds of skin and blood on a heavy chain and a shirt soaked in blood.
The Inefficacy of Christianity
Reflecting Hayden’s conversion to the Baha’i faith, which by Judeo-Christian perceptions was an exotic, and dangerous, religion that dispensed with a bookkeeper/distant God and the entire drama of salvation and damnation and professed grand ideas about humanity’s spiritual oneness, the poem harshly criticizes Christianity on two counts: it provides the racist bigots of the Deep South a sense of moral rightness, and it provides the oppressed Blacks a strategy for staying oppressed as Christianity valorizes suffering and sees it as a way to earn the reward of the afterlife.
Christianity, despite its message of compassion and forgiveness, love and tolerance, was long appropriated by white people in the Deep South to justify their nearly four centuries of racism and intolerance. The Klan can beat a Black man to death on Saturday night, get cleaned up, and be in church Sunday morning. The hypocrisy is lost on the old man for whom Jesus is little more than an ignored cry for mercy from a Black man he and his Klan brothers are castrating. Christianity makes the white people in the Deep South hypocrites. What is troubling is that Christianity never provided sufficient incentive for the South to reform, to embrace the Christian notions of moral rightness, to see their vicious acts as somehow not disqualifying them for salvation.
More troubling for the poem, however, is the idea that Christianity not only symbolizes the hypocrisy of white people in the Deep South but provides a justification as well for Black people to endure the violence, the degradation, and the injustices in the name of earning the rewards of Paradise. “O Jesus burning on the lily cross” (Line 29), says one of the italicized lines in the second part. That the suffering white Jesus is crucified on a white cross suggests that Christianity, imposed on Black people during the long and dark history of the African diaspora that first defined the institution of slavery in the Deep South, is part of the confederacy of white power intent on keeping Black people down. The religion of the white people, their white Jesus on the white cross, becomes a strategy for preserving white power as it appears to endow the quiet suffering of generation after generation of Black people as heroic, a suffering that will secure them a place in an inevitably white Heaven.
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By Robert Hayden
